Posted on 11/02/2005 7:50:16 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON – In college, Samuel Alito led a student conference that urged legalization of sodomy and curbs on domestic intelligence, a sweeping defense of privacy rights he said were under threat by the government and the dawning computer age.
President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it is now, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting data on individuals.
Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden." Alito also called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in hiring.
As a federal appellate judge, Alito has built a scant record on gay-rights issues and a mixed one, at best, on privacy matters generally, in the view of civil liberties advocates who are still examining his opinions.
But they saw in the 1971 report a prescient thinker taking on issues ahead of their time, including the need for computer encryption, stronger oversight of domestic intelligence and curbs on the surveillance powers of states.
"The document itself is amazing," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It is a dramatic statement in support of the right of privacy.
"Nonetheless," Rotenberg went on, "his decisions as an appellate judge over the last 15 years do raise some significant concerns about his willingness to apply Fourth Amendment privacy standards." Rotenberg cited an example in which Alito appeared to support the strip search of two people involved in an authorized search but not named in a warrant.
The college report was first reported in The Boston Globe.
The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates gay rights, said the report gives senators the basis to question Alito on that subject and privacy matters broadly in his confirmation hearings.
"If these are his views today – and there is no indication they are not – it's a hopeful sign that may provide some insight into his philosophy," said David Smith, the group's policy vice president. "This isn't pop-the-champagne-cork time. His views need to be explored."
Even so, Smith was struck that Alito's report would raise a subject few tackled back then, and come down so unequivocally on it. "Very few people were standing up for gay Americans 34 years ago," he said.
Harriet Miers, whose withdrawal from contention led to Alito's nomination, had gone on record in 1989 as favoring equal civil rights for gays but opposing repeal of the Texas anti-sodomy law, since overturned by the Supreme Court. Smith said that in comparison with Miers' known views on gay rights, "Alito wins and it isn't by a nose."
Alito is listed on the paper as the chairman of the conference, entitled the Boundaries of Privacy in American Society, and author of the report's seven-page summary of findings. It was done for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Alito was a senior acting as a "commissioner" for the undergraduates in his group.
Mark Dwyer, a college roommate of Alito's, said such class projects were typically "one of those academic exercises of 'let's pretend in the real world.'"
Rotenberg said the report sounds much like one produced later by a national committee drawn together by that era's Health, Education and Welfare Department. Recommendations in that report became the basis of the landmark 1974 Privacy Act.
"A lot in this paper is surprisingly forward-looking," he said.
In it, the young Alito writes that the Census Bureau should be barred from asking unnecessarily intrusive questions, federal privacy ombudsmen should be appointed and the government should face strict conditions for keeping and distributing dossiers on citizens.
Much as privacy-savvy Web sites today promise not to disseminate personally identifiable information, Alito said the government should limit its use of information on individuals to "bulk statistics."
"The cybernetic revolution has greatly magnified the threat to privacy today," he said.
In one recommendation that was commonly debated at the time but a nonstarter today, he said all computer systems should be licensed by the federal government.
The report, two years before Roe v. Wade affirmed a constitutional right to abortion, does not address that subject. Abortion-rights supporters consider that right to be a fundamental matter of privacy.
As an appeals court judge, he held that states can require women seeking abortions to notify their spouses. The Supreme Court disagreed.
Also on the bench, Alito supported a high school student who was taunted because he was perceived as gay, and a family seeking to adopt an HIV-positive child. The adoption had been challenged on grounds that the child posed a medical threat to the family's other child.
Alito also, however, wrote the majority opinion in a 1999 decision overturning a school district's wide-ranging anti-harassment policy, ruling in favor of Christian students who wanted to preach against homosexuality.
EDITOR'S NOTE – Associated Press writer Rosa Cirianni in Princeton, N.J., contributed to this report.
VALUES:
"We sense a great threat to privacy in modern America; we all believe that privacy is too often sacrificed to other values."
CENSUS
"The Census Bureau should not be allowed to report information on particular individuals to anyone. Congress should prohibit the Census Bureau from reporting any information to industry which is not available to the public."
COMPUTERS
"The potential for invasions of privacy through the use of computers is growing rapidly. ... Centralization, the creation of vast computer networks, opens the possibility of bringing together an enormous amount of information about every facet of an individual's life."
SURVEILLANCE
"We think a wiser policy is for Congress to set up a Joint Congressional Committee on Domestic Surveillance by the Federal Government. The committee could prevent domestic surveillance by the CIA and supervise domestic surveillance by the military and the separation of Army intelligence files from Army security clearance files."
FBI
"While it is clearly the responsibility of the FBI to investigate internal subversion, it is the consensus of the Conference that the FBI has interpreted internal subversion too broadly in recent years. It is our hope that a Joint Congressional Committee ... would be able to restrain the FBI from committing similar abuses in the future."
GAY RIGHTS
"The Conference voted to recommend that the current sodomy laws be changed. The Conference believes that no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden. Of course, acts of a coercive nature, acts involving minors, and acts which offend public decency should still be banned. Discrimination against homosexuals in hiring should be forbidden."
FREE PRESS
"Our Conference is well aware of the great potential for invasions of privacy by the communications industry, but we could not devise any means of eliminating or even substantially reducing that potential without, at the same time, abridging freedom of the press."
THE RAT RACE
"Psychological studies suggest that privacy is essential for creativity; tests which investigate the effects of physical crowding on rats have alarming implications for the accelerating world population and the trend toward urbanization."
And your point is???
Well, the guy has a track record..Let's talk about it...
Maybe we should have nominated Rick Santorum for the Supreme Court slot, as he seems to be faring worse by the week in his PA Senate reelection bid. He is now down to 34 percent in the latest poll. Popular national homosexual groups are holding Santorum "retirement parties" all over the country and in PA on Nov. 13.
We're all young and foolish once and survive it if we're lucky.
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2 Threads posted earlier.. FRom the Boston Globe
Alito writing backed privacy, gay rights ^
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1514352/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1513919/posts
Time to drop him and get another nominee ~ a right thinking one this go 'round.
Alito has only issued two rulings that I've seen mentioned that have any bearing on gay issues: one was favorable to gays (that a school is responsible for not acting to remedy a 'hostile learning environment') and one that was unfavorable (striking down a 'hate-speech' rule). Regardless of all that, I think it's silly to hold a college paper against someone. For all we know, he wrote what he thought the professor wanted to hear.
That being said, I hope this really is his position on privacy, because that might make him almost the ideal Justice in my book. So long as he doesn't think privacy covers killing unborn babies.
Yes, I would venture to say that most of us were young and foolish once. I would not hold that against anyone. :)
So the rats and RINO's are stuck going back to COLLEGE to smear Alito? He's what now... 51?
ROFLMAO!!!!
Alito said this when he was 21 years old! F*** we must take bring him down now! (extreme sarcasm).
I do hope you are being sarcastic......
A right to privacy, meaning the government shouldn't be snooping into your private affairs, is very different from a right to privacy, meaning you have a constitutional right to kill babies.
If he said that the federal government had no business snooping around and asking, among other things, if people were gay, or Italian American, I agree with him. Even back then he recognized that the FBI needs to protect our national security, something not all college students would agree to.
Much ado about nothing.
He is 55 now.
"Alito is listed on the paper as the chairman of the conference, entitled the Boundaries of Privacy in American Society, and author of the report's seven-page summary of findings."
This sentence demands careful and thoughtful reading before one can accept the premise offered in the article. The writer seems to attribute this group project wholly to Alito. I don't think so!
Is that 2 Ediths, a Luttig and JRB I hear warming up in the Green room. ;-)
Between Roberts and
Alito, Thomas and Scalia, we'll be OK..
The biggest obstacle we face is getting an accelerated Senate approval process done before the end of the year.
The c'Rats want to drag this out into February.. too many important cases await a full and attentive court to render their decisions on... The quicker O'Connor shoves off, the better, imo.
So the rats and RINO's are stuck going back to COLLEGE to smear Alito? He's what now... 51?
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The moron Thugocrats and thier RINO-wannbes are a bunch of losers. They have nothing better to do in Washington.
As Winston Churchill once said, "If you're not a communist at age 20 you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at age 40, you have no brain".
They are trying to scare conservatives. They really do think we cannot see through this. What a bunch of idiots.
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