Technology and Privacy
Benjamin Franklin once
said, “They who can give
up essential liberty to
obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither
liberty nor safety.”
Shane
Waller
Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade was a controversial
Supreme Court case in 1973. It
ruled that laws banning abortion
were unconstitutional. Since
then, many laws and regulations
have been passed to prohibit the
access to abortion. Anti abortion
forces have steadily reduced the
scope of abortion rights.
“Those who believe life begins at conception feel that the unborn child
deserves the same legal protections as an adult. Ending such a life is
equivalent to murder to those who subscribe to this belief. Others argue that
life begins at birth, and that laws restricting abortion interfere with the right
of a woman to decide what is in her own best interests.”
http://www.ushistory.org/us/57d.asp
Brittany McGlew
Olmstead v. United States and the
Integration of Technology in the
American Legal System
“The Fourth and Fifth Amendments sought to protect
Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their
emotions, and their sensations. They conferred, as
against the Government, the right to be let alone—
the most comprehensive of rights and the one most
valued by civilized men.” –Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis on, “The Right to Privacy.”
The integration of technology in the American Legal system, and in society in
general, severely challenged the concept of privacy within the American home,
inevitably taking away control from white males over their domestic lives,
concerning both personal and legal matters.
Daniel Rafferty, American
Politics.

“Before Prohibition, many states
relied heavily on excise taxes in
liquor sales to fund their budgets.
In New York, almost 75% of the
state's revenue was derived from
liquor taxes. With Prohibition in
effect, that revenue was
immediately lost. At the national
level, Prohibition cost the federal
government a total of $11 billion
in lost tax revenue, while costing
over $300 million to enforce.”
Lerner, M. (2011). Prohibition a Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequences/
Overview of
Abortion Rights
“Discovery and invention have
Louis D. Brandeis
made it possible for the
government, by means far more
effective than stretching upon the
rack, to obtain disclosure in court
of what is whispered in the
closet…The progress of science in
furnishing the government with
means of espionage is not likely to
stop with wire tapping. Ways may
some day 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, “Louis
Brandeis, dissenting opinion,
Olmstead v. United States, 1928.