Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimai | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a good indication that the right to privacy is obsolete. If an investigator can hear a conversation you're having in your house using amplification technology, who needs a warrant?

The whole point of the right to privacy, as I understand it, is protection against over-zealous police forces enforcing unjust laws. If you're doing something in private, and it doesn't affect anyone, you should be allowed to do it, regardless of the law.

We need a right to anonymous private activity, regardless of where or how it takes place.

View on HN

Actually, the right to privacy has nothing to do with whether a law is just or unjust. I think we'll see an element of that creep into the law as they very concept of privacy erodes. But the basic idea behind privacy in the Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure context is that police ought to be subject to oversight (by the courts) so that they don't become a menace.

Incidentally, the problem with search-and-seizure jurisprudence is that every time the Supreme Court hears a case on the subject the defendant IS guilty--the debate is over whether the evidence of guilt is admissible in court. That makes it hard for the Court to turn a blind eye so they tend to expand the law in favor of the police every time they get a new case. The alternative is to free a known criminal. It takes guts to hold police to a principle when the immediate result is to free a criminal.

This is exactly what I mean when I say the right to privacy is obsolete - by itself, it's no longer capable of protecting the freedoms it was originally intended to preserve. We need something better.

What right to privacy? Privacy is a very simple word. It occurs nowhere in the Constitution.

It may appear nowhere in the constitution, but that doesn't mean it isn't constitutionally protected.

The substantive due process protections of the 14th Amendment extend heightened protection to a number of rights. Privacy is one of them. Marriage is another. There are plenty more.

In addition the 4th Amendment has its own privacy implications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com