Reference Web Sites
1. Angelfire - Free Home Pages
2. Intelligence, Surveillance and Spies: One Family's Ordeal
3. The Intelligence Community, In Brief
4. A Government of Laws
A. Constitutional Rights of Privacy
As so succinctly stated many years ago by Supreme Court Assoc. Justice Brandeis, privacy is the "right to be let alone". Although not a separate amendment to the U.S. Constitution, our rights of privacy are implied through specific guarantees set forth in the following amendments: First, fourth, fifth, ninth, and fourteenth.
As reported by Shattuck in Bibliography Ref. 1 below, the specific portions of the foregoing amendments which provide us with our rights of privacy are as follows:
Amendment 1. Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment 4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Amendment 5. No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;...
Amendment 9. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 14. ...; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;...
B. Relevant Quotations
1. "Over himself, over his own body and mind the individual is sovereign."
John Stuart Mill
2. "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to the crown. It may be frail-- its roof may shake-- the wind may enter-- the rain may enter-- but the King of England cannot enter-- all his forces dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham
3. "...without privacy there is no individuality. There are only types. Who can know what he thinks and feels if he never has the opportunity to be alone with his thoughts and feelings?"
Leontine Young
4. "...The Fourth Amendment proclaims the 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects' and prohibits any government agency or official from engaging in 'unreasonable searches and seizures'. It also provides that a court shall issue a 'warrant' to search or seize only if the government shows 'probable cause' and particularly describes 'the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized'".
Trudy Hayden and Jack David Novik
5. "...The modern totalitarian state relies on secrecy for the regime, but high surveillance and disclosure for all other groups."
Alan F. Westin
6. "...Agencies (website author's note: i.e. within the Intelligence Community) are not authorized to use such techniques as electronic surveillance, unconsented physical search, mail surveillance, physical surveillance, or monitoring devices unless they are in accordance with procedures established by the head of the agency concerned and approved by the Attorney General. Such procedures shall protect constitutional and other legal rights and limit use of such information to lawful governmental purposes."
Executive Order 12333, Para. 2.4
7. "...Electronic surveillance strikes deeper than at the ancient feeling that a man's home is his castle; it strikes at freedom of communication, a postulate of our kind of society...[F]reedom of speech is undermined where people fear to speak unconstrainedly in what they suppose to be the privacy of home and office."
Lopez v. U.S., 1963
Bibliography:
1. Shattuck, John H.F.: Rights of Privacy, National Textbook Company, 1977, 210pp.
2. Westin, Alan F.: Privacy and Freedom, Atheneum Press, New York, 1967, 487pp.
3. Young, Leontine: Life Among the Giants, New York, 1966.
4. Hayden, Trudy and Novik, Jack David: Your Rights to Privacy, Avon Books, 1980, 190pp.
5. Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities, Signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981. A copy may be obtained at http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/codific/eos/e12333.html web site.
6. Donner, Frank J.: The Age of Surveillance, Vintage Books, New York, 1981, 552pp.
7. Lopez v. U.S., 373 U.S. 427 (1963).
8. Website author's personal files.
Signed Originally: William Albert Hewgley
December 9, 1997
This website is maintained by:
William Albert Hewgley
318 Shady Lane
Kingston, Tennessee 37763
Phone and Fax: 865-376-4169
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This is website: https://www.angelfire.com/ut2/privacyrights/index.html
Latest Update: February 14, 2010
