Sixty-four years ago, George Orwell, a British author, penned the classic book 1984. Along with the book came the notion of government surveillance and the concept that “Big Brother is watching you.” The book was on best seller and required reading lists for years as an example of what government (and privacy) might become. It has recently surged to the top of those lists again despite its age.
Americans generally presume that privacy rights are guaranteed by the Constitution – at least to a certain degree. Privacy rights feel as fundamental to our lives as liberty and free speech. Most of us have been taught from a very young age that our government was intended by our Founding Fathers to be a limited government which generally stayed out of our private affairs.
However, most Americans probably do not realize that there is no explicit ‘right to privacy’ mentioned anywhere in the text of the Constitution.
It wasn’t until Justice William Douglas’s groundbreaking opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, and the mention of guarantees of privacy found in the penumbras (shadows) of various other Constitutional protections, that the Constitutional right to privacy began to be officially recognized. Later cases such as Roe v. Wade (1972) placed additional limits on the ability of the federal government to influence our lives. Congress has passed laws such as HIPPA (1996) and Graham Leach Bliley (1999) protecting our expectation of privacy.
The tragedy of 9/11, and our government’s ongoing efforts to combat terrorism with the Patriot Act, coupled with the advent of information-gathering social networks like Facebook threaten to alter how we think about privacy. Now the Postal Service is tracking our incoming mail according to a report from the New York Times. Our government’s usage of websites and some of its institutions to mine data on some citizens forces us to ask important questions: Was it all a ruse and we never had an expectation of privacy anyway? Are our privacy rights being forfeited each time we create a Facebook page or send a tweet about what we are currently up to? What about GPS trackers on our cell phones and some new cars? Required electronic medical records? Harvesting personal information by vendors such as Amazon?
In the government’s drive to protect us, is it edging ever closer to Big Brother?
