Why isn't there a constitutional amendment protecting privacy

I’m probably wrong but I’m under the impression that there isn’t any constitutional amendment protecting privacy. It seems to me that with improving technology businesses have become little better than dicatorships. Not to mention what anybody can find out about you using the internet. I’m suprized that the ACLU isn’t all over this. So, Why?

The Constitution limits what the government can and can’t do. It doesn’t apply to private business.

Mostly because we have laws to protect privacy. Constitutional government uses the constitution to set the basic structure and operation of the government. So, a constitution sets up what laws can be enacted. It’s then up to the laws to regulate the interactions between people.

The Constitution actually has very little regarding the day-to-day operation of the government, and almost nothing regarding the interactions between people. For example, the only crime defined in the Constitution is treason. The Constitution mentions other crimes, including “Felony”, “Breach of Peace”, “High Crimes”, and “Misdemeanors” but doesn’t define them.

You are correct. There is nothing in the constitution that specifically establishes a right to privacy, though most legal scholars believe it derives from the Ninth amendment. The Supreme Court has upheld this view in a variety of cases (Griswold, Eisenstadt, Loving, and even Roe v Wade). Privacy rights are also spelled out in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments.

If the Congress had a desire to explicitly define a right to privacy or felt there was a need to do so, they could make a new amendment. The fact that they haven’t seems to suggest that nobody really thinks this is an important issue.

As to your comments about businesses and the ACLU, it’s not clear what you’re talking about or how it relates to the constitutional issues. As Scruloose says, the constitution describes the powers granted to government, not businesses or private individuals. The issue of information privacy is clearly not a constitutional one. Simple legeslative measures can (and have in some instances) been taken to protect personal information… for example health care information is protected by HIPPA, which was passed in 1996.

While most of the constitution regulates government, there are cases where it regulates (or has regulated) private business. The thirteenth amendment prohibits private businesses (or anyone else) from owning slaves. The eighteenth amendment prohibited businesses from making, selling or transporting alcoholic beverages.

My guess as to why the constitution has no privacy amendment is that the subject is too complex. There are parts of the constitution that give us privacy in certain areas - for example, the fourth amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seisures. But there are cases where a right to privacy could be a bad idea - for example, shouldn’t schools be able to run background checks on employees to make sure they don’t have any child molestors in their midst? I think it would be just about impossible to write a description in just a few paragraphs telling what forms of privacy should be considered legal rights and what shouldn’t. It’s probably best to leave this sort of thing to statutory law.

It is unlikely that such an amendment will ever be passed, it would create too many problems with current laws that have been on the books for years. The Alaska state constitution does have a privacy amendment, which was the basis for invalidating all the state laws that criminalized personal possession and use of marijuana in the privacy of a person’s own home.

A federal law would do much the same thing, only it would affect hundreds of state laws as well. Nobody wants to upset the apple cart if it can be avoided.

Name some of the legal scholars who hold the opinion that the Ninth Amendment is a source of any substantive rights.

In NONE of the cases you cite does the Supreme Court identify the Ninth Amendment as the source of privacy. None.

And those laws are really doing a great job, eh?

It is this fact that caused people like James Wilson, signer of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to oppose the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. His argument was that all rights and all power belong to the people and for the government, i.e. the other people, to take away any action whatever by an individual requires a compelling societal need that can be met no other way.

Wilson argued that the enumeration of certain rights would come to mean that those are the only rights the people can legitimately defend. And he had a good point because there are many who argue in exactly that manner.

Not the source, but certainly a source. For example, from Griswold:

Excellent point. You also made good points about amendments sometimes being used to “make law” affecting businesses and people. It’s a shame that we had to have an amendment outlawing slavery. It’s proof that every human endeavor is subject to human error.

Prohibition is my favorite argument against making law by amendment. It was a dumb law to begin with, and thinking about it now, very dumb to enact by amendment rather than law.

I can see why they had to do an amendment, though. Federal law would have been limited (at the time), and state law would have been uneven (it still is today). In all, this all proves that legislating morality is an uneven business.

I bet that the Federal government would have a much easier time enforcing Prohibition by law now than it did in 1920. After all, the Feds established 55 mph as the “maximum” speed limit across the US by the simple expedient of withholding Federal highway funds from any state that refused to go along. The power of the pocketbook reaches a long way.

At least a fair number of legal scholars hold that the Fourth Amendment’s language should be construed to cover a right to privacy, one variable with the circumstances. (You have a much higher expectation of privacy in your home than entering, say, the Gold Depository at Fort Knox.)

I have a great deal of problems with “textualists” who have problems understanding “Congress shall make no law…” and “…shall not be construed to disparage other rights” as statements with meaning that restrict what government may legally do, even if it doesn’t happen to suit their personal tastes.