Quote of the Day (Louis Brandeis, Foreseeing Intrusions Into Privacy)

“The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions…. Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?”—Louis Brandeis,  Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)

(The accompanying photograph of Justice Brandeis, ca. 1916, by Harris & Ewing, comes from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the Lack of Secrets in Society)

“There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. If a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, and usually know what he conceals.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life (1860)

Just imagine: He wrote this nearly 150 years before Facebook and Twitter!