Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is also a senior lecturer with the University of Chicago Law School. He has an OpEd in the New York Daily News called “Privacy is Overrated.” Here are just two snippets:
[Mayor Bloomberg] wants concerns with privacy to take second place to concerns with security.
I strongly agree, though I’m not sure that the Constitution will have to be reinterpreted in order to enable the shift of emphasis that he (and I) favor. Neither the word “privacy” nor even the concept appears anywhere in the Constitution, and the current Supreme Court is highly sensitive, as it should be, to security needs. The Court can and doubtless will adjust the balance between privacy and security to reflect the increase in long-run threats to the lives of Americans.
There is a tendency to exaggerate the social value of privacy.
and
Privacy-protecting laws are paternalistic; they are based on a skepticism regarding whether people can make sensible evaluations of an arrest record or other private facts that enter the public domain.
Still, a good deal of privacy just facilitates the personal counterpart of the false advertising of goods and services, and by doing so, reduces the well-being of society as a whole.
Read his entire commentary on NY Daily News.