Count me among those appalled by the plethora of "social networking" and instant communication sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. It's not that I am uncomfortable with the technology per se--after all, I do post to this blog on an increasingly regular basis. I am uncomfortable with the implications "resources" like Facebook et al. have for the most fundamental American values.
It took decades and decades and decades for the US Supreme Court to recognize that the Bill of Rights enumerates specific instances of what is every American's most fundamental right: the right to privacy. The reason the Founding Fathers didn't just call it that is because such terminology was not part of the governmental vocabulary of the time. Just because they didn't call it "the right to privacy" doesn't mean they didn't intend to define or describe that right. It's not unlike an indigenous society calling a railroad an "iron horse" or an airplane "a metal bird." Things are described as accurately as possible within the limited framework of the existing vocabulary.
[I still say Justice Scalia missed the biggest implication of his majority opinion in last term's gun rights case--by hanging his interpretation of the Second Amendment on an American's unfettered right to have guns in his own home, he relied on the right to privacy, whether he called it that or not, and despite his oft-stated opposition to any such "right to privacy."--Ed.]
But how in the world are we to preserve the right to privacy and to call on it to defend ourselves from unwarranted governmental intrusion into our lives if all our behavior abrogates it? Whether it's because people posting to Facebook et al. are giddy from the relative anonymity they have, if they are just so desperate for contact with others that they'll say anything, or if it's for some other reason--analysis after analysis has found that people who participate regularly on such sites reveal a lot more than they perhaps intend. So much so that the line between what is public and what is private has become quite blurred.
If our collective behavior demonstrates that we no longer consider anything private, it becomes impossible for the government to violate our right to privacy. No matter how unwarranted the wiretap, the search of the house, the confiscation of papers, the government can do whatever it wants and take whatever it wants . . . and we have no legal grounds to complain. By our own behavior, we've already given up our rights.
In my more paranoid moments, I wonder whether this hasn't been the intended outcome all along. A poorly educated populace doesn't know what its rights AND responsibilities really are; therefore, it can neither define nor defend them. It doesn't matter a whit what the Constitution commands if there exist no means to enforce same. So we continue to base school funding on property taxes, guaranteeing that the residents of the poorer districts will never climb out of the traps of poverty and poor education.
Worse, that those residents will become the objects of ridicule and scorn. Look at the general reaction to the woman who called 911 three times because her local McDonald's was out of Chicken McNuggets yet took her money and wouldn't give it back. The scorn and outrage were directed at her, not at the McDonald's staff who wouldn't give her the refund she was totally entitled to get. Yes, she was wrong to use 911 to register her complaint--but she didn't seem to know better. She kept telling the 911 operators that it WAS an emergency. [Poor education, remember?--Ed.] But what the McDonald's employees did approached extortion--they wouldn't give her back her money when they couldn't fill her order. They tried to make her take and eat something she did not want. I am as much offended by the cruel stupidity of that as I am by the woman's repeated calls to 911.
The richest of the rich thus keep their riches and preserve a poorly educated (thus mostly complaint) laboring class. Once we lose enough of a sense of "self" to give up any sense of individual decorum or restraint, there will be no valid legal argument to keep the government out of our homes and even our thoughts--no matter what we say on paper about the limits on our government's power over us.
The most dire threat to any free society is in fact its freedoms. Within them they hold the seeds of their own destruction. More personal freedom is nonetheless preferable to any other system. But with rights DO come responsibilities. We must be diligent in protecting our freedoms. We cannot let them atrophy by apathy, ignorance, or carelessness.
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