How Safe Are You Facebooking....
... or how much infos about you on the web ...
Law Students Teach Scalia About Privacy and the Web
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
“TEACHING moment.” A nice, hopeful phrase describing lessons learned from real life that help
illuminate an academic subject — the opposite of “book learning.”
This spring, the students of an elective course on Internet privacy at Fordham Law School expe-
rienced a number of fascinating “teaching moments” during an assignment meant to demonstrate
how much personal information is floating around online.
The assignment from the class’s professor, Joel R. Reidenberg, was, admittedly, a bit provocative:
create a dossier about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from what can be found on the Internet.
Why Justice Scalia? Well, the class had been discussing his recent dismissive comments about Internet
privacy concerns at a conference. His summation, as reported by The Associated Press: “Every single
datum about my life is private? That’s silly.”
A gauntlet of sorts had been thrown down — though Professor Reidenberg said in an interview that he
would disagree with that interpretation. The assignment, he said, was “not about embarrassing anyone,
not about targeting Scalia in the sense of choosing him because of anything about his work on the court.”
(He was also quick to point out that the year before, the assignment focused on himself.)
Justice Scalia was a natural choice — a highly public figure with good reason to guard his privacy. Good
luck, for example, finding a direct phone number for his chambers.
Yet
the class managed to create a dossier of 15 pages, Professor Reidenberg reported to a
conference on privacy at Fordham, that included the justice’s home address and home phone number,
his wife’s personal e-mail address and the TV shows and food he prefers.
How could there not be an aspect of poetic justice in creating the dossier: Still think the issue is “silly,”
your honor? Teaching moments, after all, are not only for students.
(rest of article on above link)