The Republican (Conn.), March 8: The right to privacy, as we know it, was born late in the 19th century. Will we let it die in the early years of the 21st?
There’s been much focus of late on a particular iPhone. The one in question: a device used by one of the shooters in the terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, California, late last year. Authorities have ordered Apple to create an operating system that would allow investigators to break into the device without it self-destructing. Apple is fighting the order.
But this story is about so much more than a single iPhone. It’s about each individual’s fundamental right to privacy. It’s important never to forget that, because the feds want the focus to be on fear, on terrorists, on keeping the citizens safe.
It’s also important to remember that the feds were opposed to strong encryption well before San Bernardino. They hate the idea that people can hold in their hand an electronic device containing data that they cannot access.
Just as so many people cherish their privacy.
In the earliest days of our nation, the battle was between liberty and security, not privacy and security. The focus on privacy came about, at least in part, because of emerging technologies, particularly photography and the telephone.
Photographs taken surreptitiously and then published in newspaper gossip columns were intruding into people’s lives. A seminal 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, written by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, compellingly made the case that the right to privacy, at its core, is a “right to be let alone.”
This piece, and its thinking, became the basis for many legal decisions to follow, including cases on wiretapping and surveillance.
All of which is to say that the case of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone is so much greater than is often portrayed. Officials have admitted that if they are given access to that particular phone, there are many, many others in their possession that they’d like to peruse.
Eventually, of course, the phones of ordinary people would no longer be safe. If you believe that your business is your business, that you possess, as an American citizen, a fundamental right to be let alone, then you’ve got a dog in this fight.
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