Monitoring
Lawrence Lessig highlights three motivations for protecting (individual) privacy. One, minimizing burdens (no goons in jackboots stomping through your house). Two, protecting dignity ("You said I might be WHAT?"). Three, keeping the government from imposing other restrictive laws (it's hard to make sedition illegal if you can neither collect the evidence for it nor force the subject to testify against himself, and it's hard to make contraception illegal if you can't catch them doing the deed).
According to Lessig, the writers of the Constitution could have held either the dignity or burdens conception (possibly the third conception, too) without it affecting their restriction on search and seizure. At the time, burden-free search wasn't possible. But now it is, or could be, or will be soon. He addresses the question of how law should change, or be interpreted, to deal with this. I'm interested in that, and I'm interested in what the continuing trends in this direction mean.
As monitoring and control technologies get better, the sphere of permissible or "free" human activity shrinks, not because there are fewer things that we are capable of or because people discover the desire for new prohibitions, but because finer and more precise control is possible. Efficiency is in this sense the enemy of freedom. Many of our freedoms are frictional; we can do things that increase the risk for others (say, uttering a semi-casual death threat towards another to a friend) without paying a risk premium for them only because the cost of gathering the information and imposing the cost exceeds the cost/value of not doing so. As efficiencies increase and costs shrink, the "sphere" of freedoms will shrink along with it, until it is skin-tight. Many though not all of the efforts of organizations like the ACLU and the EFF go towards erecting artificial props to keep the canopy of that bubble from tightening as far as it can go.
Perhaps this is the same argument as the one that argues that all control will be ruthless and conducted through force. But perhaps the counter to that argument is also a frictional one, and this same friction is the only reason we have any liberties free from threat of violence.
According to Lessig, the writers of the Constitution could have held either the dignity or burdens conception (possibly the third conception, too) without it affecting their restriction on search and seizure. At the time, burden-free search wasn't possible. But now it is, or could be, or will be soon. He addresses the question of how law should change, or be interpreted, to deal with this. I'm interested in that, and I'm interested in what the continuing trends in this direction mean.
As monitoring and control technologies get better, the sphere of permissible or "free" human activity shrinks, not because there are fewer things that we are capable of or because people discover the desire for new prohibitions, but because finer and more precise control is possible. Efficiency is in this sense the enemy of freedom. Many of our freedoms are frictional; we can do things that increase the risk for others (say, uttering a semi-casual death threat towards another to a friend) without paying a risk premium for them only because the cost of gathering the information and imposing the cost exceeds the cost/value of not doing so. As efficiencies increase and costs shrink, the "sphere" of freedoms will shrink along with it, until it is skin-tight. Many though not all of the efforts of organizations like the ACLU and the EFF go towards erecting artificial props to keep the canopy of that bubble from tightening as far as it can go.
Perhaps this is the same argument as the one that argues that all control will be ruthless and conducted through force. But perhaps the counter to that argument is also a frictional one, and this same friction is the only reason we have any liberties free from threat of violence.