The Los Angeles Times reports that Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, is asking the US Supreme Court if there is a constitutional right informational right to privacy. “Thirty-two Terms ago, the Supreme Court hinted that there might be and has never said another word about it,” Kozinski wrote in a dissent (pdf) in Nelson v. NASA. Kozinski wrote: 

With no Supreme Court guidance [...] the courts of appeals have been left to develop the contours of this free-floating privacy guarantee on their own. It’s a bit like building a dinosaur from a jawbone or a skull fragment, and the result looks more like a turducken. We have a grabbag of cases on specific issues, but no theory as to what this right (if it exists) is all
about. The result in each case seems to turn more on instinct than on any overarching principle.”

The issue arises from the successful challenge by workers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech and other federal aerospace contractors to the Bush administration’s demand for probing security reviews after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.  

A majority of the appeals court’s 27 active judges voted against convening an 11-judge panel to reconsider Nelson vs. NASA, the case brought on behalf of more than 4,000 JPL employees.
Senior research scientist Robert M. Nelson and 27 other JPL specialists sued NASA in 2007 to thwart the government’s demands for access to their financial, medical and psychiatric records in exchange for letting them keep their jobs. The personal information was sought as part of a badge-issuing program ordered by the Department of Homeland Security in 2004.

A federal district judge initially dismissed the employees’ suit, but a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit endorsed their claim to privacy in a January 2008 ruling.    

On Thursday, the appeals court rejected (pdf) petitions for another three-judge review and for the fuller en banc rehearing.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 and is filed under Anonymity, Civil liberties, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Identification, Medical data, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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