No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. |
| | The right to privacy is one of the most salient civil liberties issues today, despite the fact that the word "privacy" neither appears in the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights. The Right to Privacy, famously called the "right to be left alone" by Justice Blackmun, is built on combination of the right to "liberty", as described in the fifth and fourteenth amendments and the ninth amendment. Privacy, in turn, underlies a wide range of issues, including reproductive freedom, the "fundamental fairness" of investigations and police procedures, and online "cyber-liberties." The Right to Privacy is a very dynamic area of civil liberties law because it must change in time with new technology, such as the internet, and because it relies on the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard, which is itself very malliable. |
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Monday, September 9, 2002 |
Arlington TX Police Requesting Thumbprints for Checks
Arlington Texas police proposed Operation Thumbs Up, a voluntary initiative for local merchants to collect thumb prints with checks, as a deterrent to forgery. This has a couple of civil liberties and privacy implications:
It highlights the growing problem of identity theft. Unfortunately, identity theft cannot be solved by the seemingly perfect solution of biological identifiers, such as fingerprints, because identity theft can actually involve several intervening forms of identification that eventually associate a fingerprint with a different identity. This process can easily begin with a social security number, which is supposed to be very private but is in fact requested by businesses regularly. Identity theft is practically a difficult crime to prevent, but the solution is implausible unless it keeps identity more private, not less.
It also mentions the growing problem of surveillance databases, which in this case is a database of citizen fingerprints. Without this type of database, collecting fingerprints with checks is almost useless. Unfortunately, like many other databases used by the police and other government departments, they do not take into account the due process rights of the citizens whose records are being added or modified.
[Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Privacy Digest]
3:16:09 AM 
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© Copyright 2002 Lucas Burke.
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