Archive Report
Archive Report
Prominent Cases of Invasion of Privacy
American citizens have gained in recent months important new safeguards against invasion of their privacy. At the same time, many have learned for the first time how fragile have been the walls of protection against snooping. Two Supreme Court decisions in less than a year —the most recent on April 4 —have at last begun to define the constitutional barriers to invasion of privacy. But other events and disclosures raise doubts about how effectively even a constitutional right to privacy can be defended in the present “fishbowl age.”
Airing of three recent cases of snooping in widely separated areas of life has demonstrated how easily the private lives of individuals may be exposed to strangers. The three cases concerned a ...