"“This case can’t be a one-time deal,” said Neil Richards, a professor at the Washington University School of Law. “This is about the future.”
Mr. Richards is the author of “Intellectual Privacy,” a book that examines the dangers of a society in which technology and law conspire to eliminate the possibility of thinking without fear of surveillance. He argues that intellectual creativity depends on a baseline measure of privacy, and that privacy is being eroded by cameras, microphones and sensors we’re all voluntarily surrounding ourselves with.
“If we care about free expression, we have to care about the ways in which we come up with interesting things to say in the first place,” he said. “And if we are always monitored, always watched, always recorded, we’re going to be much more reluctant to experiment with controversial, eccentric, weird, ‘deviant’ ideas — and most of the ideas that we care about deeply were once highly controversial.”
“From a historical perspective, we’re entering into a very new era,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Not long ago, we were living in a world in which surveillance was difficult. “In the past, you and I would have a conversation in person. No record would be made; nobody would have access to it. I wrote things on paper; I burned them in my fireplace. They were gone forever.”
But in the absence of technical and legal protections, technology is upturning those presumptions.
“Now we have a surveillance-enabled world,” Ms. Granick said. “It’s cheap, and it’s easy. The question that society has to ask is, Is that what we really want?”"
- Date Published:02/24/2016
- Original Publication:The New York Times