(ArtsyGeek) Many people have spoken of privacy disappearing. But it’s not just a post-9/11 issue, it’s an issue endemic to the American way of life. From airline ticket counters to buying preferences to genetic information, privacy is at greater risk than ever before. First, there’s the issue that gets press daily, as it should. This is the erosion of privacy at the hands of the government. What makes it the most odious is the fact that it is done in secret, and can be conducted by “brute force”, legally speaking. By that, I mean that the government, like no other entity can demand access to information, or to a persons property to plant monitoring devices. This combined with secrecy puts a special onus on the people to speak up, because the government is supposed to defend the people against such invasions. It is not the roving wiretaps, library searches, Carnivore, or any other surveillance program. But just because loss of privacy in one arena is currently more odious, other arenas of our lives are still at risk, like the loss of privacy in the public arena. The problem is the government can outsource work to corporations that maintain databases, and that currently, is legally and constitutionally kosher. Further, corporations have had an increasing amount of power that even holds government at risk (see a companion paper entitled “The Coming Ad-Hoc Government” in later issues or elsewhere on this board) because of the control of extremely personal information, like genetic background. There may be a dark future, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We are guaranteed a right to basic privacy in our homes and in the affairs of our persons, as [i:48cd59c33c]Griswold v. Connecticut[/i:48cd59c33c] indicates. This is becoming increasingly affirmed by the courts. The Supreme Court has ruled that road blocks can only be done for pressing public interest, in City of [i:48cd59c33c]Indianapolis v. Edmond[/i:48cd59c33c], ruling that drug stops with an interest in drug interdiction are invalid. Even the dissent in that case shined a light on future privacy jurisprudence with Justice Thomas’s dissent stating: “I am not convinced that [i:48cd59c33c]Sitz[/i:48cd59c33c](affirmed sobriety checkpoints) and [i:48cd59c33c]Martinez-Fuerte[/i:48cd59c33c](affirmed illegal alien checkpoints) were correctly decided. Indeed, I rather doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment would have considered reasonable a program of indiscriminate stops of individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.” Indeed, we’ve come a long way in terms of privacy, from the court upholding wiretapping in Olmstead v. United States, to the dissenting opinion in that case being used to support everything from birth control to the right to decide ones medical fate as in [i:48cd59c33c]Roe[/i:48cd59c33c] and [i:48cd59c33c]Griswold[/i:48cd59c33c]. The courts are tightening the government’s violations of privacy, at least those that the courts have control over. Yet, even in the face of that, there’s a great deal of work to do, such as better oversight for Foreign Intelligence or FISA wiretaps and searches, now essentially extended to US Citizens under the PATRIOT Act. In the private sector, there’s even more work to do, such as reform in laws to allow the private information of Americans to be just that, belonging to that individual, and only released to those that the person wants such information to be released. The modern foundation of the right to privacy comes from that dissent in [i:48cd59c33c]Olmstead[/i:48cd59c33c], written by a Jurist named Louis Brandeis who said”The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men the right to be let alone.” In that opinion Justice Brandeis penned this warning: “Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent, teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.” And so against this doctrine, we all should set out faces.