Illustration by Esha Maharishi We have learned by now to expect and to fear the masked army of the internet: Anonymous. It makes the consumer aware of the volatility of his privacy, at a time when our intense networking and the establishment of facial profiling and information databases have made our privacy disappear. By toying with the digital presence of Sony and the CIA, Anon has established the faceless mass as a player, however symbolic,...
...whether a similar kind of friends-list analysis could one day become the social equivalent of a drug test—a quick and easy means of coerced transparency. It is one of this decade’s ironies that a kind of voluntary erosion of privacy has coincided with an increased consciousness of civil liberties—indeed, the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping opened up a discussion on transparency focused around the government’s powers vis-à-vis the persona...
...made, but certainly it was significant. ACE: What do you think can be done to protect people from covert government surveillance, specifically in the US? What sorts of defense do citizens have against that sort of invasion of privacy? SN: There are robust constitutional protections and there are legal avenues that are being pursued to challenge these methods of surveillance. It’s our view that the these protections have to be upheld and that the...
...Even the strides we made through Roe v. Wade have had limited success. The main achievement of that court decision was to forbid the federal government to directly prevent women from obtaining an abortion due to the right to privacy. However, what it failed to do was simultaneously acknowledge that a complete “laissez-faire” approach wasn’t adequate either, as it precluded the acknowledgment of “reproductive freedom” as a fundamental human right...
...ni’s participation in the games are really more alarming than uplifting. The disheartening facts are as follows: Shaherkani lost her match in 82 seconds. She had never before competed in public and has been taught judo in the privacy of her home by her father. Ms. Shaherkani is only a blue-belt in judo and the fact that she was competing at all against Olympic black-belts has been contested and questioned in the media; the international judo fede...
...in this crazy world of ours – even throwing your hands up in the air and leaving it to others to handle is a political action in and of itself. Political responsibility, in my opinion, for those in government and those in the privacy of their homes, is echoed in the words of President Josiah Bartlet, who asks, ““Mrs. Landingham, what’s next?” Constance Boozer Editor-in-Chief...
...are is connected to the Internet, then it is part of the public domain and subsequently, all the information retained on it is part of public space as well. We’ve only started to pull back the curtain surrounding questions of privacy and security on the Internet. Can copyrights and trademarks be invoked on the Internet? More importantly, are distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, website defacements and hacks that are conducted to retrieve...
...lity of care. Some of the innovations include disease registries to support good care for people with chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma and group treatments. Though it may sound blasphemous to Americans accustomed to privacy, Healthy San Francisco believes certain medical procedures are appropriate for a group. Answers to routine questions like how to get care at clinics, preventative questions, and so on are now being offered by trained...
...eyes of many, far to the right of the political mainstream. His “strict constructionist” understanding of the Constitution would not have allowed for civil rights legislation, progressive economic policies, or basic rights to privacy. Bork’s nomination led to violent debate on the Senate floor and across the country. When the dust had settled, Democrats succeeded in defeating Bork’s nomination 58-42, and Republicans settled for the much less pola...
...e “prurient” interest, soft and hard-core alike. In the mean time other less restrictive regulations on Internet access to pornography, almost wholly focused on the protection of minors, have been adopted. Due to the landmark privacy case Stanley v. Georgia (1969) that established the right of any adult to possess pornography, as well as many subsequent decisions that uphold the rights of consenting adults to do practically anything together, att...
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