• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 675 0

ask private Internet companies for an index of the Web and information on users’ searches. For example, in 2006, the government requested this information from a number of companies including Google. Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, decided to fight against these government requests that blatantly violate the right to privacy while on the Internet. Unfortunately, Google lost in court and ultimately handed over the information. However, despite losing the legal battle, in April 2010, Google launched a “Government Request Tool,” detailing the requests of worldwide governments to take down content, or to turn over information, relating to the uses of its search engine, YouTube, and its blogging software.40 To no surprise, the United States government ranked second in data requests, with 3,580. To gain perspective, this is more than three times the next government’s requests, which happens to be one of our closest allies, the United Kingdom.41 As a user of Gmail, YouTube, or the Google search engine, you must stay vigilant and aware of your right to privacy.

100

Conclusion

If the government’s historical attempts to regulate who you can marry, when you can have kids, and its ability to track your almost every move are not frightening enough, now consider the passage of Obamacare. Your once private communications and medical decisions with your doctor will now be regulated and monitored by the government. The law requires the Department of Health and Human Services to issue forty thousand laptops, one to each primary care physician in the United States, and it requires the physicians to record for federal bureaucrats whatever you tell your physician and whatever your physician tells you. How can one day the Supreme Court declare a “zone of privacy” that includes the right “to care for one’s health and person” and the next day the then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claim Congress’s power to regulate health care is “essentially unlimited”?

And the invasion of your natural right to privacy does not end there. Now, because of the individual mandate, on an ongoing basis you will be required to provide personal medical details to an insurance company. What information is more personal than your health? The ACLU describes medical information as “arguably the most personal and private source of data about us”; yet, the ACLU refuses to challenge Obamacare because of its support for the welfare state.

101

The philosopher Ayn Rand argued that when government destroys your privacy, it destroys your dignity and your uniqueness. And then, by regulating your privacy, it controls you.

Thus, it is up to you to elect officials willing to repeal Obamacare, the Patriot Act, the spy cameras, and numerous other pieces of legislation stripping you of your natural right to privacy. The government bureaucrats will fiercely fight back by claiming they are maintaining national security, providing medical care to impoverished children, and the Constitution grants them the authority to do so. But do not wane in your efforts to fight this political rhetoric, for we never want to fulfill Benjamin Franklin’s prediction of losing our essential liberties for temporary safety.

103

Chapter 7

Hands Off:

You Own Your Body

As we have seen, your body is yours and yours alone. If you do not have control over your own body, what then do you control as an individual? Think about it. If you were financially broke with absolutely no real property or possessions to your name, the only thing over which you have full and complete autonomy is your own body. You have the power to direct what goes into it—what you eat, what you drink, whether you exercise, and whether you take vitamins or drugs. You also own whatever your body produces—the fruits of your labor, the sweat of your brow, the manner of your expression.

Reason and human nature dictate that the legs, arms, muscles, fingers, toes, torso, eyeballs, brain, and feet with which you enter and exit the world belong to you as the sovereign individual, including every action or word