Tim May wrote:
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I listened last night to some of the "Wall Street Journal" editorial staff opining on CNN that "there may be a constitutional right to privacy, but there is no constitutional right to anonymity."
Wrong on both counts. There is no "right to privacy" in the Constitution.
That's exactly why some people argued against passage of the Bill of Rights a couple of centuries ago: the listing of some rights in the BoR would be taken as a complete listing. The Ninth Amendment is supposed to counteract that, but it's so widely ignored as to be meaningless. If the US Constitution does not clearly state that the federal government is allowed to invade your privacy, they're not allowed to. It doesn't matter how the Interstate Commerce clause is construed, nor how "provide for the common defense" in the preamble is read: if the Constitution doesn't explicitly give the feds the right to snoop on your private affairs, they don't have it.
Hell, at this rate we may see quartering of troops!...
The Third Amendment's prohibition on the quartering of troops has been given as a possible defense for evidence gathered by snoopware. Is a program, installed by a federal agent on a privately-owned computer, a "soldier" for Constitutional purposes? SRF -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel 617-670-3793 "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato