A couple months back, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had this to say about Internet privacy.
“The vast majority of your rights are not constitutional,” he asserted. “Most of them can be taken away.
“Once upon a time, people would have thought it outrageous to have someone pass his hands over your body, and to have to take your shoes off in order to get on an airplane,” he continued. “As it turned out, that freedom was not below the constitutional minimum. Congress could eliminate it.”
Scalia also viewed home addresses as public information.
"Considering every fact about someone's life private is "extraordinary," he said, noting that data such as addresses have long been discernible, even if technology has made them easier to find.Which makes one not only question the right to privacy under the Constitution, but also ask...how silly is silly?
(...)
"Every single datum about my life is private? That's silly."
A group of law students got a crack at an answer.
Well, Fordham Law Professor Joel Reidenberg interpreted that as a challenge. He gave the fifteen students in his Information Privacy Law class a special assignment this semester: Track down everything available on the Web about Antonin Scalia to compile a dossier on him.So far, no pics of just what's under Scalia's robe have surfaced, thank God.
(...)"Justice Scalia said he doesn't care what people find out about him on the Internet," said Reidenberg during his presentation on the transparency of personal information. "So I challenged my class to compile a dossier on him."
Now four months later, at the end of the semester, the dossier (available online somewhere, but password protected) is 15 pages long. Among its contents are Nino's home address, his home phone number, the movies he likes, his food preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address, and "photos of his lovely grandchildren."
Scalia's thoughts on the assignment?
Justice Scalia wasn’t too happy about the Fordham professor’s assignment but didn’t change his position because of it. In a statement to the Above the Law blog, he said:
It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.
Actually, on that front, the Justice got it wrong. It wasn’t poor judgment; it was a good lesson - a reminder for the Justice and all of us, for that matter, that the information we put on the Internet is definitely accessible by anyone with an Internet connection.Read more about all the silliness over at Jonathan Turley's blog here.
