The Political Importance of Substantive Privacy Rights

Next year, I will be a Privacy Research Fellow at NYU's Information Law Institute. As I was applying, I decided to write a post explaining why I was applying to privacy jobs in the first place, and why we should all care about privacy from a political process point of view. I was thus already in the middle of writing this post when I found out last week about the fellowship, but it's pretty much unchanged from what it was. A little while ago, Frank Pasquale posted a review of Daniel Solove's Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, a book I immediately added to my reading list. While I can't yet speak to the book itself as there are intervening books on my reading list, the review hits the main reason I am interested in privacy:

Solove finds in the First Amendment a set of principles to guide a modern vindication of Fourth Amendment rights. We have a right to freedom of expression in large part because we cannot properly think for ourselves, develop our own personalities, or act as citizens without some guarantees that these activities will not draw undue attention from powerful individuals and institutions who do not share our views....

Egypt's Assault on Information: As Unamerican as...America?

Unless you've been living in a cave the last week or so, you've heard about the demonstrations (revolution?) going on in Egypt. This post isn't really about the protests themselves. It's about governmental assaults on information as a crackdown measure (with Egypt's being the most current). As a practical matter, any autocratic regime will suppress communication in a time of insurrection. It's been done throughout history, and this is no different, other than it being in the information age. Interestingly, these protests were reportedly even organized on Facebook, so that seems like an even more logical target. (See, it can be used for political protests more extensive than changing a profile picture.) And unlike the Iran protests, in which there was no "Twitter revolution" (all the tweets were in English, not Farsi, and came from this hemisphere), Twitter seems to be in legitimate use here.

So of course, what did the Egyptian government do in response? Shut down the internet:

Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.