school and work place privacy

1. Introduction
The use of the ‘state of art’ technology to surveil our daily activities and perusing those
records of those activities possess a great threat to the right to privacy. Bugging, wiretapping,
and other modes of communications spying are regulated by the Constitution, specifically in the
Fourth Amendment's barring of unreasonable seizures and searches (Wittes 30). It is a great
contradiction that, most types of transaction and physical surveillance are not officially
acknowledged by the constitution as searches that violates the Fourth Amendment.
Consequently, much of this surveillance, even though constitute a search in effect, is not
formally regulated by law. Without requiring our consent and our knowledge, the government is
able to constantly surveil many of our schools’ daily activities, via global positioning systems,
closed circuit TV, and a wide variety of other state of art technologies. With just a keystroke,
records that contain our financial information, e-mail logs, phone and, and even private medical
information can be easily accessed by law enforcement agencies. These acts of surveillance by
the US government, from the increasing using of global positioning systems and closed-circuit
TVs and to a wide range of state of the technologies that can be used to access records on daily
activities in schools pose an insidious insult on the Americans’ freedom that the law has failed to
deal with. (Slobogin 2007), quotes ‘This failure results from the unwillingness of courts and the
legislatures to acknowledge how pervasive and routine our government surveillance system in
our schools has become’. In order to ensure that the government’s employment of this powerful
tool is not misused, the Constitution, and specifically the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution
must stand firm. Whereas some of these technologically backed investigative methods have been
around for a long time, most of them are recent in their origin, and their employment by the law
enforcement agencies has increased alot in the years as a result of the terrorist attacks of the
September 11, 2001.

2. Background
The new technologies have provided the US government unprecedented means of accessing our
personal information. To ensure that all people can have the right to seek information and
express themselves without fear, there has to be reasonable checks on governments’ power to
access, collect, and keep individuals’ data. Both our security and freedom can be protected,
however only through reasonable laws and policies that respect human rights. One of most recent
transgression by the government in tapping into the new technology involves the use of local
drones. These drones are to be used as a crime combating tool for law enforcement agencies.
However, flying drones over our schools and spying on us while we carry out our daily lives
does not represent an example of protecting our rights. Infact it violates them. The regional use
of drones to spy on Americans kids at school violates the Fourth Amendment and restrains our
rights to privacy.
Theorized Effect of the Technology on Democracy.
Constitution 3.0 is particularly disquieting due to the fact that emerging technologies
raise knotty constitutional challenges; and that the Supreme Court’s history with these issues is at
most spotty (Wittes 117). The Court’s freedom of speech jurisprudence, for instance, is mired by
a series of gross miscomprehensions regarding communications technologies, for instance as its
assumption in Olmstead v. United States that an individual making a telephone call has no right
of privacy because of projecting their voice outside of their homes, or their assertion in the Reno
v. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that internet users rarely encounter contents by
accident. The general pattern is a Supreme Court purporting to adapt what it thinks it knows
about free speech regarding a given new communications media. The obvious result is a clumsy

3. effort to graft a set of interpretive rhetorics onto constitutional issues that might well call for
different strategies.
Grigsby points out, that the repercussions of imprecise interpretive tricks are especially
dire when they look like they are constitutionally forward looking, and this is poses a problem
when the Courts analyzes technology in the light of its opinions. Every time the Courts try to
analyze how new the technology fits into constitutional assessment, they find themselves in
guesswork that impacts how the Constitution is being interpreted later on, and they do so
whether they have guessed it right or wrong about the new technology they are struggling with.
The most bracing question is whether our legal institutions are genuinely capable of coming up
with coherent and meaningful responses to the changes that new technologies come with.
The essays in Constitution 3.0 is depicts the possibility that the importance of personal
self governance as a defense against intrusion of our privacy is fading away even as the ways in
which we can restrain intrusion of our conscience are increasing. In a nut shell, while we
appreciate the self direction and our personal daily functions, we are actually losing our right to
control how much data regarding us is available in cyberspace in addition to having almost no
control on how the government and marketers intend to use that data (Wittes 221) .
Ideological analysis
Privacy issues now seem always to be in the news. It is often debated by the US
Presidential candidates, and it is the subject of several legislative hearings, in the nation (Grigsby
259). Lack of sensitivity to privacy concerns can jeopardize the careers of government officers.
Privacy is obviously an issue whose time has come.

4. There are many compelling reasons to believe that the modern challange of information
privacy has evolved without the regard neither to specific cultural traditions nor to the effect of
different ideological beliefs. On the one hand, technology itself possesses a powerful force for a
cross national convergence. The definition of the privacy challange and the diverse responses via
information privacy or data protection laws has alot to do with cross fertilization of ideas that
occurs via a community of privacy experts. Lessons have to be drawn about how best to address
and respond to the problem (Grigsby 109). This would ultimately led to harmonization attempts
by the international organizations. The different concerns for privacy definately have their
source in diverse historical experiences. In general terms, however, one can argue that the forces
leading to convergence have been quite overwhelming, and have consequently led to similar
public concerns, and somehow similar policy feedback.
Recommendations.
The use of aerial objects for surveillance should be subject to stringent regulation to ensure that
their employment does not invade on the privacy that Americans have all the time enjoyed and
rightly deserve. Iam of the view that innocent Americans should not have to get worried that
their activities will be spied on by drones. To this end, I recommend that the use of drones should
be outlawed for indiscriminate mass surveillance, or for surveilling based on the First
Amendment-protected activities (Grigsby 98).
Refference:
Grigsby, Ellen. Analyzing Politics. Cengage Learning, 2008.
Rosen, Jeffrey, and Benjamin Wittes, eds. Constitution 3.0: Freedom and technological change.
Brookings Institution Press, 2011.