"Neil M. Richards, Professor of law at Washington University School of Law, MO, explained that while the enduring values of privacy and free speech have always been important to librarians, in an online world it is particularly important to think about how the two fit together. In his recently published Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age (Oxford Univ. Press), Richards looked at surveillance in light of what a society needs in order to grow and thrive.
Current technology, he noted, is engineered to create records and preserve drafts. But part of the way we make sense of the world is by thinking, reading, and speaking about issues; protecting the privacy of that process is an important part of free speech. “This zone of intellectual privacy…is essential if we’re to generate new and interesting and possibly destabilizing ideas,” Richards said. “Remember, most of the ideas that we’ve come to cherish the most in our society were once heretical, deviant, destabilizing”—the notions that all people are equal, that they should be able to explore their religious beliefs, that people should be in charge of the government rather than vice versa."