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IPFS News Link • Privacy Rights
The Right to be Left Alone
• by Andrew P. Napolitano"Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you."
— "Every Breath You Take," song by The Police
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesn't create the right; it limits government interference with it.
Shortly before he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race, President Joe Biden misquoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that Justice Scalia believed that the Bill of Rights creates rights. As Justice Scalia wrote, reflecting his view on the origins of all personal liberty, the Bill of Rights secures rights, it doesn't create them; it protects them from the government.
Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They precede the existence of the government. They come from our humanity.
The idea that rights come from our humanity is the essence of Natural Law theory, which was first articulated by Aristotle in 360 B.C. The natural law teaches that right and wrong are discoverable by the exercise of reason and there are areas of human behavior — the exercise of rights — that are immune from government interference. Aristotle's views would later be refined by Cicero, codified by St. Thomas Aquinas, explained by John Locke, woven into Anglo-American jurisprudence by British and American jurists, and immortalized in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson.
Thus, our rights to be alive, to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to assemble with others, to defend ourselves from crazies and tyrants, to travel, to own property, and to be left alone are all hard-wired into our human nature. Nature is the means through which God passes along His gifts to us. We come about by a biological act of nature. God's greatest gift to us is life, and He tied that gift to free will. Just as He is perfectly free, so are we.