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....

Clearing out the Browser Tabs - A Recap of News Over the Holiday Break

Happy New Year! While our finals turned into a brief holiday hiatus, strangely, the news did not stop! Therefore, for my first post of the new year, I bring you a hodgepodge of stuff that has accumulated over the last couple weeks in my browser tabs.

From cell phones to torture to Angry Birds! I might actually start doing this occasionally as things happen in my areas of interest, but perhaps do not merit entire posts themselves.

Photography Is Not a Crime, Despite States' Best Efforts to Make it One

This is an issue that's been around for a while, but only in the last year has it really started to pick up incredible steam. A Gizmodo post from earlier this summer, titled "Are Cameras the new guns", has made the rounds, bringing a little more attention to the issue.

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

The post refers to Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts, where people have been convicted for recording police officers on duty. These were not arrests for surreptitiously recording cops either, we're talking video cameras in hand, recording their own arrest, or their loved ones'. The very idea that it could be a crime to record cops acting out in the open, where there is no "expectation of privacy" (the relevant legal term), while they are speaking at a volume that is naturally audible, is so absurd it defies words.