U.S. Supreme Court 'Stop and Frisk' Opinion Parallels Privacy Harms Paper

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotamayor wrote a dissenting opinion on the policy of "Stop and Frisk" police practices -- introduced by mayors such as Michael Bloomberg, who is now running for president -- that was so persuasive it was published as part of a literature compilation by 826 National (Dave Eggers' group.) The compilation is called "The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017".

Privacy harms, the harms of being watched are very hard to articulate. Even the top privacy legal scholars struggle to make the case that being surveilled make a concrete difference in the lives of the middle class. One attempt was made by the two most famous privacy law scholars right now, Danielle Citron and Daniel Solove, who co-authored "Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data Breach Harms". I've read a lot of privacy law literature and I would not rate that paper as one of my favorites. However, it did illustrate what a struggle it is to put privacy *and* security importance into words at this point in our human story.

But reading Sotamayor's legal opinion on "Stop and Frisk" could build a bridge in the direction of understanding that "data breach harms" are real.


--------------------------------
Further Reading and Watching:

"My resentment at being observed wherever I go strikes some of my friends and family as a strange quirk. Even my teenager rolls her eyes at me. But as Assia Boundaoui shows in her chilling documentary The Feeling of Being Watched, I have reason to be concerned."   thenation.com  📰

"The Feeling of Being Watched":   pbs.org  🎥





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.