Terry Gross Interview

Interpreting The Constitution In The Digital Era

Facts/Details

1.  None of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today.
2. Ginsburg said we do have an expectation of privacy in the whole of our movements, and therefore when the police are going to engage in long-term surveillance, they should have a warrant.
3. Because a lesser invasion was unreasonable at the time of the framing, Brandeis said the court should translate the Constitution and recognize that you don't need a physical trespass to create an unreasonable search.
4. We can't rely simply on judges enforcing the existing Constitution to protect the values that the Framers took for granted.
5.  There's a bill pending in Congress right now that is a bipartisan geolocational privacy bill.
6. In the US, there is no expectation of privacy on the street.
7. We can be permanently tarred for one mistake we made on the Internet. 
8. The French data privacy commissioner has said that there should be a legal right to escape your past on the Internet. He calls it the droit a l'oubli, the right to oblivion.
9. We regulate private-sector data gathering much less vigorously than Europe does because we don't have a tradition in America of protecting a right to dignity.
10. Google has been under a lot of pressure - in particular from Senator Joseph Lieberman - to remove terrorist videos on the Internet.

Questions

1. How do you draw the line between surveillance and real-time view of public space?
2. Does America's view of privacy differ from those of European countries?
3. What is protected when you put something on the internet?
4. In the US, do we have an equivalent to the European privacy commission?
5. Should government do more to regulate what goes on the Internet, or does this violate our right to free speech?