AFFIRMATIVE PRIVACY — GENERAL 15

EXTENSIONS

WE MUST DEMAND THAT THE GOVERNMENT SHOW GOOD CAUSE BEFORE INVADING OUR PRIVACY

St. Petersburg Times, December 31, 1999, SECTION: EDITORIAL; EDITORIALS; Pg. 16A TITLE: Privacy under attack // acs-EE2001

These cases do not present sympathetic sets of facts, but the principles at issue are more important than whether one lowly drug dealer gets away with his crime. What's at stake is our right to demand that the government present good cause before invading our private property.

ELIMINATING PRIVACY ALTOGETHER WOULD NOT BE A PRUDENT DECISION

Linda C. McClain, Professor of Law, Hofstra University School of Law, March, 1999; WILLIAM & MARY LAW REVIEW, " RECONSTRUCTIVE TASKS FOR A LIBERAL FEMINIST CONCEPTION OF PRIVACY," EE2001, hxm P.

Finally, an adequate liberal and feminist conception of privacy and private choice requires more than a defense of negative liberty. As Allen helpfully suggests, we should not give up on privacy as "freedom to" (or "claim to") rather than simply "freedom from." n113 Liberalism correctly insists that governmental respect for negative liberty is a necessary condition for autonomy, or personal self- government. n114 But perfectionist work, emanating not only from feminist and civic republican sources, but also from within liberalism itself, suggests that merely leaving persons alone may not be sufficient to ensure meaningful self- government. n115 Perfectionists usefully direct attention to the need for a conception of governmental responsibility to secure the preconditions for enjoying privacy and exercising private choice. n116 Civic republican political theorist Michael Sandel speaks of the importance of a "formative project" or "formative politics," whereby government inculcates in citizens the qualities of character and the virtues necessary for self-government. n117 As I have written elsewhere, a common theme in civic republican, feminist, and liberal perfectionism is a call for a formative project that involves governmental responsibility to help citizens live good, self-governing lives. n118

DISHONEST MEANS OF COLLECTING INFORMATION ARE

IMMORAL

Gary T. Marx, Prof. of Sociology at Univ. of Colorado- Boulder, VISIONS OF PRIVACY: Policy Choices for the Digital Age, "Ethics for the New Surveillance," 1999, EE2001-JGM, p.43

Are there some means of personal information collection that are simply immoral? Torture is the obvious case. Other techniques that many observers find unethical include the polygraph with its tight-fitting bodily attachments, manipulation, and questionable validity; a drug test requiring a person to urinate in front of another; and harming or threatening friends or relatives of a suspect in order to obtain information. Similarly, most persons recoil at the thought of certain coercive bodily intrusions such as pumping the stomach of a suspect believed to have swallowed evidence or removing a bullet from the body for ballistics matching (practices that the courts have generally prohibited). In contrast, the non-consensual collection of hair, blood, and fingerprints has greater acceptability.

For many moral theorists and much of society lying, deception, and manipulation are a cluster of means that in and of themselves are ethically questionable. These come together in the case of undercover tactics. Such means (unlike many other surveillance means) always present a moral dilemma. This is not to suggest that under certain conditions and for certain ends they may not on balance be appropriate. But no matter how compelling the latter, this does not alter the fact that in our culture neither lying and trickery, nor physical force and coercion, are morally preferred techniques.