Page 113 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

7

Liberal Communitarian

Approach to Privacy

and Security 1

A. Balancing Privacy and Security
1. The Liberal Communitarian Approach

2
Liberal communitarian philosophy (developed by the author ) assumes
that nations face several fully legitimate normative and legal claims and
that these claims can be neither maximized nor fully reconciled, as there
is an inevitable tension among them. It follows that society must work out
some balance among the conflicting claims rather than assume that one
will always trump the others. This chapter applies this approach to the balance
between security and privacy. 3
In contrast to this balancing approach, contemporary liberals tend to
emphasize individual rights and autonomy over societal formulations of the
4
common good. At the opposite end of the spectrum, authoritarian com-
5
munitarians (mainly in East Asia ) privilege the common good a priori,
and pay mind to rights mainly to the extent that they serve the rulers’ aims.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the Fourth Amendment is an eminently liberal
communitarian text. When it comes to give-and-take over what qualifies as
legitimate public policy, liberal communitarianism starts from the assumption
that the public’s right to privacy must be balanced with the concern for national
security (and public health, among other common goods), rather than from
the position that any breach of privacy contravenes an inviolable basic right.

2. The Advocacy Model

Deliberations about public policy as carried out by elected officials, in
think tanks, and in public discourse in the contemporary United States