Posner: Privacy Is ‘Overvalued’

Though he said Congress should limit how the NSA can use data it collects, much of “what passes for privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said at a privacy and cybercrime conference last week. “If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” Posner said. Other speakers at the event, including Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Margaret McKeown, disagreed with Posner, although McKeown acknowledged that when people are voluntarily sharing so much personal information online, it can be difficult to determine what a “reasonable expectation” of privacy is.