Cauterizing the Cancer Centered in Washington, D.C.

[Steve Furlong]

Tim May wrote:

<<civil rights in the US, and the herd stampeding to give them away>>

> 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