Schneier on Security

jsminch • February 24, 2006 6:17 AM

Doesn’t it seem peculiar that so many people who read this blog and, presumably, think about privacy on a fairly regular basis, have such a difficult time explaining why such an obviously Orwellian thing as the government putting video cameras in our homes is wrong? Some write about cops seeing us naked or abusing the info that they get or whether or not it would be an effective way to protect the public. But only a few have said that the action of the government putting cameras in our private homes is, in and of itself, wrong, regardless of what they may or may not do with the information.
It seems that folks who are so concerned with privacy might have thought a little bit more about such things. After all, all other discussions about what should be kept private and who they should be kept private from depend upon these very points. I asked myself why this might be such a problem for folks and came up with two possibilities.

1) There is no “right to privacy??? explicitly enumerated in the Constitution.
My answer to a cop asking “…why should you worry about it?” would be “Because it’s my house.??? And that is all that he needs to know. I realize that this is not a direct answer to his question, but that’s not my fault, he’s the one who asked the wrong question. It is not a matter of my “worrying about it??? or not, it’s about the Constitutionally recognized fact that in the U.S.A. I have the right to do, or not to do, what I wish with what belongs to me. The problem is that our legislatures and courts have spent the last several decades eroding our rights to property, but any “right to privacy??? is inextricably tied to a right to own the thing that one wishes to keep private. The concept of one universal all-encompassing “right to privacy??? that has been extrapolated from the Constitution by the courts since the fifties has had the effect of divorcing the two, and, divorced, both become meaningless.
Several decades ago America began (with entirely good intentions, and many good results), telling people who they had to serve in their businesses. Then we went on to tell them who they had to employ in their businesses. Then who they had to rent their homes to. Then what they had to include in their health insurance. Until now, here in Washington State, we just voted to relieve business owners of their right to allow people to smoke in their businesses. The same people who moan and wail about the Patriot Act are more than willing to remove someone’s right to run their business the way they want to on their own property.
Many cities are know for property taxing folks out of their fully paid for homes. But if the government can tax you out of your home, then you don’t own your home. The Supreme Court decided that your city can take away your home to put up a shopping mall, which also boils down to… you don’t own your home. If I want to build a deck in my back yard I have to get permission from the city… I don’t own my land. All of this is going on under the noses of those of people who fight daily, in the courts and in the streets, for their “right to privacy.??? But they say nary a word. But if you don’t own your home, why shouldn’t the cops be able to put a camera in it? We have handed our property over to the State already, now we’re getting upset because they want to see what’s inside?
There is no right to privacy explicitly enumerated in the Constitution because it was assumed that I would be allowed control over what was mine, including the right not to let other people use, look at it, or tell me what to do with it. This is a right we no longer have.

2) In a relativistic society, there are no real “rights.???
Perhaps the other reason people are having such a hard time defending what they consider to be a basic right is that, whether you want to believe it or not, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written and ratified by people whose world view (whether Theist or Deist) included a creator God that had granted certain rights to mankind, and, therefore the fact that we have rights and that tree (or, at the time, that Black Man) over there doesn’t, is because God gave them to us. But nowadays such a belief is passé and we try to find other sources for our rights. But rights must always be granted, (or at least believed to have been granted) never invented out of “whole cloth,??? because if they are invented then anyone can make up their own and therefore that cop has just as much a right to put a camera in my home as I have to stop him. And if he can argue it better in court, or before the town council (see Plato’s Republic), then he has more rights than me. Whether one believes in God or not, trying to establish human rights without Him is like trying to nail a board to the wind.