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Re: constitutional rights



At 05:46 PM 4/13/00 -0500, brian whatcott wrote:

Take an example from the last month or two.
Northwest Airlines was upset that their Stewardesses apparently
organized an (illegal) sick-out.

Northwest petitioned a judge for permission to seize
the personal home computers of named members of their staff.
And the judge acceded to the petition.

The PCs were indeed seized from private homes and examined for
evidence of this illegal action.
Subsequently, one or more of those crew-members was fired.

So the moral of this story appears to be:
Quote the constitution all you want, but above all, don't get
suspected of illegal (or any?) actions which may impact business
or industrial profits.

Hmmmm. This seems to overstate both sides of the privacy-rights issue. I
see things differently, namely:

On one side: There is not, nor ever has been, nor IMHO should be, an
absolute right to total privacy.

On the other side, merely "suspecting" someone of illegal actions is not
sufficient basis for intruding on someone's privacy.

==

One basic principle is that and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause, supported by Oath or affirmation....

That means among other things that anonymous tips don't suffice (as the
supreme court reaffirmed 9-0 a couple of weeks ago).

And it certainly means that it is not sufficient to accuse someone merely
of impacting "business or industrial profits".

==

There's lots more to the Northwest story.

*) One might ask whether a "sick-out" should have been illegal at
all. Perhaps a sick-out was the appropriate forum for airing the
underlying dispute; perhaps a better forum should have been found. These
are question for labor law, based on a careful weighing of public-policy
issues. These are not constitutional issues, nor privacy issues.

*) One can ask deep questions about whether a "small" transgression
justifies a "large" invasion of privacy. This is the real gray area, the
fuzzy edge of the grand principles.
-- Some people see this as the most important issue raised by the Jones
v. Clinton case. The Clinton-haters and the Clinton-supporters disagree as
to what constitutes "large" versus "small". The issue was raised but not
settled.
-- This appears to be the real constitutional issue in the Northwest
case. To discuss it one would need to know a lot more about what was
seized and what was its supposed probative value.

========

Bottom line: Sometimes there are black-and-white issues of principle
(especially in physics); sometimes there are gray areas (especially in
law, politics, and public policy). When discussing the gray areas, it is
best to avoid escalating them to black v. white status.

PS: This is getting pretty far off-topic.
I'll probably post nothing more in this thread.