 If you have private information that you want to keep private, just stick it in an E-U-L-A. Nobody is ever going to read it. Privacy isn't explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but it probably should have been. Louis Brandeis was the first U.S. Supreme Court justice to write about privacy as a legally defensible right. In 1890, he published a paper in the Harvard Law Review with Samuel D. Warren that was simply entitled, The Right to Privacy. Now, privacy as a right was a novel concept at the time. Before Brandeis, wiretapping without a warrant was 100% legal. After all, the text of the Fourth Amendment only protects physical things like papers from being searched and seized, not phone conversations. Brandeis looked at the text of the Fourth Amendment differently. He argued that during the time of the framing of the Constitution, the only way to know somebody's thoughts against their will was by force, intimidation, or by going through their personal effects. Brandeis insisted that the intent behind the Fourth Amendment was to protect U.S. citizens not just from the unpleasantness of interrogation, but from the invasion of their privacy by the state. Now, many people have different views about the extent of the right to privacy. The most common rebuttal against Brandeis' position is something called the nothing-to-hide argument which is cited by both government intelligence agencies and suspicious parents. If you're not doing anything wrong, then why do you need privacy at all? After all, laws exist to protect and to foster people's well-being. The more that law enforcement can see what people are up to, the less of a chance of somebody getting away with criminal behavior and thus, the safer everyone will be. However, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly prohibits any arbitrary interference with a person's privacy. The question is, why is it a big deal if someone at the NSA is reading your email? The heart of Brandeis' right to privacy argument is simply that people should have the ability to determine how and to whom their thoughts and feelings are communicated, if at all. That's important for several reasons, but I'm going to focus on two. First, privacy is the last refuge for liberty. No matter how oppressive laws become, so long as you have a private place where you can do, think, and say whatever you want, that's a stronghold that even the most oppressive government can't overcome. Think about it like this. Even under Stalin, if you had a truly private place, you had all of the liberties guaranteed to you by the Bill of Rights. That's freedom of religion, free speech, all of it. Second, privacy offers the opportunity to imagine and practice things without fear of social repercussion. Society is a structure that has evolved over a very long period of time to be very stable. That's great for people because we get to enjoy that stability in the form of things like currency and infrastructure. However, the price of that stability is that it's also awfully resistant to positive change. We'd still be living with an awful lot of terrible status quotes if people's lives were on display 24-7 throughout history. Education of women, drinking, recreational sex, interracial relationships, masturbation, the freedom to be Jewish or Protestant or Catholic or atheist or whatever. We owe a good portion of our freedom to do all of these things to our ability to do them behind closed doors without our neighbors or the authorities finding out about them. I think that Brandeis gave us a gift in viewing privacy as a right unto itself. Now, the mediums have changed, but it doesn't matter if it's through G-Chat or through a phone call. You should have the right to communicate your thoughts and feelings to whomever you wish without a third party finding out about them. Of course, there's also the opposite view, if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear from government surveillance. Leave comments, let me know what you think. This is my nerd crit, this is a vacuum tube from Raytheon. Let's see what you had to say about science fiction and artificial intelligence. Sam pointed out that human-like thought and memory could be said to be based on emotion instead of just containing it. I don't know whether or not to believe this, but in response to her query about an artificial intelligence that exhibits emotion convincingly, if that existed do you think that we would even be having this conversation? She also brought up an excellent point by a lot of opponents to the development of artificial intelligence, which is that the human mind is incapable of comprehending itself and we can't program something that we don't understand. I don't think that's true. I think that any advanced mathematics is operating in a space that we can't actually inhabit mentally. For example, I can add the numbers 20 billion and 50 billion in my head, but that doesn't mean that I have any intuitive grasp or understanding of those numbers. Is a blown-foam reference Star Trek The Next Generation, which is one of my favorite shows ever and the inspiration for the previous episode. She says that an artificial intelligence that is sophisticated enough to ask for rights should be given them technically, but that human beings tend to demonize things that don't fit into their nice categorization schema, which is sadly true. Semi-IM chimed in with yet another very thoughtful post about what happens if we decide that artificial intelligence actually should be granted rights and what happens to all of the software that leads up to that intelligence, whether there's going to be some sort of arbitrary cutoff and what happens if people don't make the cutoff and it's just fantastic and you should click right now and go to the episode and comment on it. And finally, my dad commented to let me know that in an episode about artificial intelligence, I forgot to mention IBM's Watson. Thanks, dad. Next week I'm going to talk some about open-source software and intellectual property. There's some links in the description if you'd like to read up on it. Blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.