The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that I’ve been following on PogoWasRight.org since 2007. From SCOTUS blog:
In another case bearing on claims of privacy, the Court Monday added to its decision docket a case involving the broad issue of whether the Constitution protects a “right of informational privacy” — that is, a form of Fifth Amendment protection against government demands for personal information. The Supreme Court mentioned such a right in a 1977 decision, and has seldom mentioned it since. A group of workers employed by California Institute of Technology, and working under contract at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory outside of Pasadena, won a court order against some of the government demands for information about their private lives — part of background checks similar to the security reviews that regular federal employees often undergo.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration took the issue to the Supreme Court in NASA v. Nelson, et al. (09-530). The petition argued that the lower court ruling not only jeopardizes the government’s authority to get information about contract employees, but also about its capacity even to demand information from its own agencies’ employees. “The ramifications of the decision below are potentially dramatic,” the petition contended.
Some of the previous news coverage here.