Not so fast, nosy government

Not so fast, nosy government

Los Angeles Times: By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court has ruled that contract employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory must undergo the same background checks — including questions about drug abuse and treatment — that are required of government employees. The decision is defensible on the grounds of consistency, and such checks are a long-established feature of both public and private employment.

But privacy advocates still have reason to cheer this decision. In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. assumed for the purposes of argument that Americans have a constitutional right to “informational privacy” that limits what the government can require of them. That right was overridden in the case of the JPL contract employees, Alito wrote, because the government was acting in its role as employer. But in other cases, he suggested, the right may exist.

But Justice Antonin Scalia would have none of it. In a concurring opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia declared flatly that “there is no constitutional right to ‘informational privacy.”’ If there are to be protections against intrusive information gathering by government, he wrote, they must be approved by Congress or state legislatures.

Most discussions of a constitutional right to privacy have historically dealt with either the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures or the right to control one’s intimate activities (such as the right to abortion). Informational privacy is a natural extension of those sorts of rights, especially in a computerized age.