Samuel Alito Quotes
In circumstances involving dramatic technological change, the best solution to privacy concerns may be legislative. A legislative body is well situated to gauge changing public attitudes, to draw detailed lines, and to balance privacy and public safety in a comprehensive way.
Samuel Alito, Opinion, United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct 945 (2012)
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The call for embedding the balance in the law is in contrast to the past where the balance was left to the discretion of the intelligence agency leadership but technological limitations curtailed their ability to unbalance things too much.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The intelligence and law enforcement advocates of reducing privacy rights so that law enforcement can prevent acts of terrorism frame the question as a tradeoff between civil right and safety. However, as Leahy and many others point out, we would not be much safer if we gave up all our ivil rights. Further, hundreds of thousands of American have given their lives so that we would have those civil rights. Without them what are we protecting.
Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.
He was referring to all the data that health insurance companies, retail stores, vendors such as Amazon.com, credit reporting companies, maintain on most Americans. He made the pint that private sources maintain much more private information on Americans than does the government. People acquiesce as they perceive some benefit.
Historically, the Privacy Issues have taken a long time to be reflected in laws or regulations. Technologists are far ahead of the lawyers and politicians.
The law enforcement and the intelligence agencies have been claiming for a number of years that etrong encryption (encryption which no one can crack with existing technology) if used by the general public would really hinder law enforcement and espionage efforts. The Federal government actually obtained a court order prohibiting the inventor of the stong encryption frm sharing the equations and techniques with anyone--as blatant an infringement to the right of free speech as there was been. The order was ignored and although the government tried to intimidate the developer by threatening him with prison. He refused to comply and the government finally dropeed the case, as the courts would almost certainly find such a jailing unconstitutional. However, although they tell the courts that there is a clear and present danger if terrorists use encryption, no one had, up to that time, found a single case where being able to decypher the encryption would have prevented an attack.
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served since January 31, 2006. He is the second Italian-American justice to serve on the Supreme Court, after Antonin Scalia, and the eleventh Roman Catholic.
