on Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 07:16:03AM +0200, Anonymous (nobody@remailer.privacy.at) wrote:
For the lawyers and lawyer larvae out there...
In an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week, there is an article about MUNI's policy of making audio recordings of passengers.
<quote> Nathan Ballard of the City Attorney's Office told the Bay Guardian that they were well aware of the policy and approved it. "There are no expectations of privacy in public," he said. Ballard asserted that the policy was constitutional and did not fall under any wiretapping laws. When asked if all of the vehicles that employ this surveillance policy post signs to inform passengers that their conversations are being recorded, he said, "This policy does not require signs." </quote>
Frankly, if I'm sitting in the back of an empty bus, talking to the person next to me, it's my opinion that there certainly is a reasonable expection of privacy. Does anyone more qualified than I care to tell me why I'm right or wrong?
Jeffrey Rosen's _The Unwanted Gaze: the destruction of privacy in America_ is a good general read on this topic, and is generally recommended. It doesn't cover the issue of "privacy in public" in depth, though the issue is really more one of moving anonymously (or at least largely unrecorded) through public spaces. Rosen does discuss privacy at home and at work, and in cyberspace. The index doesn't specifically list "public spaces", though there's some discussion of anonymity. Brandeis and Warren wrote a law review article in 1890 in the _Harvard Law Review_. Rosen does touch on expectations of privacy in public spaces: In _The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera describes how the police destroyed an important figure of the Prague Spring by recording his conversations with a friend and then broadcasting them as a radio serial. The other interesting discussion is of the Olmstead case (the original wiretap case). I would raise objections on the basis of the Fourth and Forteenth Amendments. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]