Frankly I'm a bit deep fried after all the social media firestorm that was this week. Google+ goes live to the public, which is to say, it's on perpetual beta. Facebook changed their layout, again, and the crowd goes wild. Just when the crowd was calming down then Facebook announces more chances, Timelines, and other social media extras that guarantee less of your life is private. (I think team member Roma is onto something, his response to all the talk? Delivered with a devilish grin and a glint in his eye, "what's a Facebook?")

It's worth noting that all this transpired while the market plummeted, in what felt like a remake of a movie we've already seen (or if you are George Lucas remade and ruined.)

So rather than commentary, opinion and lists of updates I would like to leave you with this for deep thought:

From Exploring Constitutional Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, an overview of the right to privacy.

 The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy.  The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.  In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people."  The meaning of the Ninth Amendment is elusive, but some persons (including Justice Goldberg in his Griswold concurrence) have interpreted the Ninth Amendment as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.

The question of whether the Constitution protects privacy in ways not expressly provided in the Bill of Rights is controversial.  Many originalists, including most famously Judge Robert Bork in his ill-fated Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have argued that no such general right of privacy exists.  The Supreme Court, however, beginning as early as 1923 and continuing through its recent decisions, has broadly read the "liberty" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee a fairly broad right of privacy that has come to encompass decisions about child rearing, procreation, marriage, and termination of medical treatment.  Polls show most  Americans support this broader reading of the Constitution.
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The future of privacy protection remains an open question.  Justices Scalia  and Thomas, for example, are not inclined to protect privacy beyond those cases raising claims based on specific Bill of Rights guarantees.  The public, however, wants a Constitution that fills privacy gaps and prevents an overreaching Congress from telling the American people who they must marry, how many children they can have, or when they must go to bed.  The best bet is that the Court will continue to recognize protection for a general right of privacy.

I can't help but wonder what the founding fathers would make of the internet, or Facebook. Would they like it?

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.