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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately 'privacy' is an overloaded word in US politics.

A "Right to Privacy" is never called out in the Constitution, but between the due process clause and the ban on unreasonable search and seizure, the supreme court ruled that it is implicitly there.

Then the supreme court ruled that partly because of this Right to Privacy, abortion should be allowed. (i.e. Roe v Wade). I definitely DO NOT want to have Roe v Wade discussion on HN, but it is important to recognize that baggage is associated with Privacy.

We really will never get all the states on board because of that.

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The issue is more nuanced than the picture you present. In 1967, the Fourth Amendment was extended to areas in which a person had the "reasonable expectation of privacy" (Katz v. United States). This is well established precedent which, in the worlds of Justice Scalia, "[Katz] has been around for so long, we're not going to overrule that". In a recent case, United States v. Antoine Jones, both a right leaning justice (Alito) and a left leaning justice (Sotomayor) expressed strong concerns in favor privacy.

The above illustrates that the problem is not with privacy, as you seem to think. Thinkers across the ideological spectrum generally believe people have the right to keep things private in many areas of their lives. The question is to what should this right apply and to what extent. Privacy is not doomed just because it is linked to Roe. It has well founded support in a range of cases.

It's important to remember that the federal Constitution and rulings by the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution represent the floor of permissible action, not the ceiling. So, although there exists a somewhat amorphous "right to privacy" that has been applied to things like abortions, sex, contraception, and other things, this is not to say that Congress or state governments couldn't pass laws that further increase these rights. In fact, many state constitutions provide vastly more protections for their citizens than the federal Constitution does (specificaly becasue almost all states became states prior to the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states).

Point being, presuming that something is not a "right" or even a "fundamental right" simply becasue it does not exist in the Constitution or hasn't been interpreted to be included in it is, in my mind, a miscontruing of our federalist system. You could conceive of every state passing legislation permitting abortions (or not making abortions illegal) and have the same result as Roe. Similarly, if Congress has the power to pass a "Privacy Bill of Rights" as normal legislation (i.e. through the commerce clause), this would effectively "increase" the rights everyone has. If Congress wanted to pass a law (again, presuming that they had the power to--which is the underlying issue here) saying something like "everyone has a right to privacy," or criminalizing entities who impinge on people's privacy, this would also effectively increase the rights of everyone, subject to Congress changing its mind in the future.

One of the very difficult problems with anything political in the states is that all the terminology has been overloaded to the point where it's not really clear what people are saying.

What's a war? Does it involve a draft and killing large numbers of people somewhere? Nope. We have a war on poverty, a war on drugs, a war on obesity, and so on. How about "rights" what's a right? Is it some piece of property that the government is forbidden to take from you? Nope. We have an airline passenger's bill of rights, a right to contraceptives, now a privacy bill of rights, and so on.

I think people mean well when they re-use words like this. It certainly sounds more serious to say that such-and-such is a right. The problem is that when talking about the structure of the system overall, as opposed to just the change you are suggesting, you need to know what things are and where things fit together. I think this structural knowledge of the theory behind the way things are supposed to fit together -- the design pattern of the country if you like -- has been lost over time. now politicians just ask "what do people want", then spin it up to sound as dramatic as possible, then throw hundreds or thousands of pages of legislation at it until it looks as if it's been "fixed". If this were coding, it'd be obvious that they were just thrashing around, trying to hack their way through tons of cruft to try to get something to compile.

The lack of clean structure and terms makes talking about and resolving everything a lot more difficult than it should be.

> I think people mean well when they re-use words like this.

You're being too generous.

> The lack of clean structure and terms makes talking about and resolving everything a lot more difficult than it should be.

That's the intent. There are many who benefit by maintaining the status quo. The last thing they want is to make things clear. When things are clear, the populace at large has a nasty habit of voting sensibly and in the process, disenfranchises the few who are benefiting at the expense of everyone else.

You have parasites on both sides of the isle. Ranging from unions to defense contractors. Clear and frank conversations are dangerous to people who draw a check from the government.

Exactly. In my opinion if it's not a constitutional amendment it's not worth anything. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies barely follow the constitution at times, forget following simple bills.

I feel like we don't even try to follow the Constitution as the Law of the Land in the United States anymore.

Look at Drug Prohibition for instance (at a federal level). When they tried to do it with Alcohol in the 20's at least they had respect for the rule of law to properly make it a constitutional amendment.

Now we have federal raids in California for marijuana, where the people being raided haven't broken any local state laws.

Depressing.

'But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.' -Lysander Spooner

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