The Cycle of Moral Panics

Privacy and Moral Panic

Americans have been writing laws to keep technology from eroding privacy for more than a century. Stewart Baker, former General Counsel of the NSA argues that most of them have turned out worse than useless. Privacy, he argues, is situational. Our sense of what is private adapts to the new technology, but not until we've gone through a moral panic — searching for scapegoats, from NSA to Google — and punishing them to stave off the future. But laws adopted in the grip of a moral panic rarely make sense when the fever passes. Like Prohibition or the panic over computer games, privacy panics leave us with laws that are widely ignored or selectively enforced to serve wealth and power.