From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 04:40:25 +0800
To: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
Subject: Re: There's no general right to privacy -- get over it, from Netly (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <199706122248.RAA11848@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970613145642.197C-100000@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> > likes to say "Privacy is not an absolute right, but a
> > fundamental right." But in truth, privacy is not a
> > right but a preference: Some people want more of it
> > than others.
> 
> A right is not a question of popularity or amplitude, it is a question of
> existance. It is or it isn't. Some people want more guns than others
> (obvious even to you) so you seriously hold that there is no fundamental
> Constitutional right to own firearms? Or speech, we don't all want to use it
> to the same amount, we therefore don't have a right to free speech? Or (oh
> my god!) crypto, we don't all want to use it to the same degree therefore we
> don't have a right to use crypto?

No, privacy is not a right, it is most definitely a preference. If you 
allow information to become freely available then there is no way to put 
the genie back in the bottle, once information is available it requires 
restrictions on freedom of speech to stop the spread of that information, 
and restrictions on freedom of private equiment to prevent its storage 
and use. 
This is all based on freedom of speech, there is no such thing as 
"private information" in the sense of it being somehow wrong for 
unauthorised people to posess that information, it is up to you how much 
privacy you prefer and correspondingly how much effort you put into 
preventing information from becoming available.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"