Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
After seven-year-old Megan Kanka of New Jersey was abducted, raped, and mur-
dered by a neighbor who had a criminal record as a pedophile, Congress passed a law
requiring that local police release information about registered sex offenders living in
the community. Today there are more than half a million registered sex offenders in the
United States. Some experts say police are overwhelmed by the number of offenders they
need to monitor; the experts question the value of laws that require persons convicted of
relatively minor offenses to be registered along with those who have committed terrible
crimes [3].
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, concerns about national secu-
rity have risen significantly, at the expense of privacy rights. A 2006 poll revealed that
a majority of Americans support “expanded camera surveillance on streets and in pub-
lic places” (70 percent), “law enforcement monitoring of Internet discussions in chat
rooms and other forums” (62 percent), “closer monitoring of banking and credit card
transactions, to trace funding sources” (61 percent), and even “expanded government
monitoring of cell phones and email, to intercept communications” (52 percent). Re-
markably, one-third of those polled agreed that “this use of investigative powers by the
president should be done under his executive authority without needing congressional
authorization” [4]. In post-9/11 America, President Nixon's abuses of presidential power
seem like ancient history.
In this chapter we consider the impact that federal, state, and local governments in
the United States have had on the information privacy of those living in America. The
word “privacy” does not even appear in the Constitution of the United States, and it
has been difficult for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government to
find the right compromise between demands for privacy and competing concerns. We
survey legislation designed to protect the information privacy of individuals as well as
legislation allowing law enforcement agencies to collect information about individuals
in an effort to prevent criminal or terrorist activities. We look at famous examples from
American history in which governmental agencies engaged in illegal activities under
the banner of protecting public safety and/or national security, and we see how the
US Supreme Court gradually shifted its view of information privacy rights over time.
To organize our presentation, we will use the taxonomy of privacy proposed by
Daniel Solove [5]. 1 Solove groups privacy-related activities into four categories:
1. Information collection refers to activities that gather personal information. We discuss
issues related to information collection by the government in Sections 6.2 through 6.6.
2. Information processing refers to activities that store, manipulate, and use personal in-
formation that has been collected. Sections 6.7 through 6.9 focus on the information-
processing category.
3. Information dissemination refers to activities that spread personal information. Section
6.10 provides examples of laws designed to restrict information dissemination by private
1. Reproduced by permission of the publisher from Understanding Privacy by Daniel J. Solove, p. 103,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
 
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