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2 Comm. Law. 1 (1984)

handle is hein.journals/comlaw2 and id is 1 raw text is: PUbhication of the Forum Committee on Communicati Lw Arnerican Ba- Associaltion Ly e r Voime 2. Numoer Winter i984 NMII Orwell Was Wrong! Personal Privacy and Human Dignity Still Exist in 1984 BY CHARLES W JOINER hirty-five years ago, the British novelist and essayist eorge Orwell foresaw a world in which a totalitar- ian regime would harness the powers of technology to completely subvert the auton- omy of its subjects. Orwell saw two forces converg- ing to destroy human dignity as a re- sult of loss of privacy. First, he pro- jected an explosion of science that per- mitted personal privacy to be destroyed. Sec- ond, he sug- gested a breakdown in morality, permitting the im- moral and intemperate use of science to control the lives of others. Orwell has largely been proved right, in effect if not in detail, in his prediction of scientific ability to invade the privacy of others. He was accurate when he described that modern man can create machines that can see into every nook and cranny of what were heretofore private domains, that can record every sound and transmit it surreptitiously to listeners in distant places, and that can store vast amounts of information in a manner that makes it readily accessible and malle- abie by those who control these devices. He failed, however, to anticipate the response of modern man to this onslaught of intrusive ability. Man is made of sterner stuff than Orwell pre- dicted. Man has fought to protect his auto- nomy. Man began the develop- ment of ways and means through law to control the intru- sion on his pri- vacy. My thesis issimple. The ability to in- vade privacy generated by the new devices of the past thirty-five years has forced us, through the law, to face issues we never anticipated before, much less faced. Before science made it possible for us to intrude into the per- sonal privacy of others, we had developed mechanical means of protecting privacy. We ran away. We hid. We pulled blinds. We built walls. With the advent of Orwellian science we began to debate the ethics and morality of autonomy and privacy. We began to develop legal solutions to (Continued on page 16) U aho- 0 JOSp0 ('0OC

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