Students Search the Internet for Personal Information on Justice Scalia 0
A Fordham University law school professor does not believe there is enough privacy protection online. To prove the point he assigned his students a novel research project. This year’s students were challenged to create a dossier on the notoriously private Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from publicly available information. Scalia was not amused.
ABC News reported that Professor Joel Reidenberg asked his students to compile any personal information they could find online about Justice Scalia. The students are said to have found such information as a home telephone number, his wife’s email address and pictures of his grandchildren. Justice Scalia was not pleased saying Reidenberg showed “abominably poor judgment”.
Reidenberg sought to prove the point that although there is often small bits of information about individuals on the Internet when all of those pieces are compiled it becomes a very thorough profile. Reidenberg adds that while personal information might have always been accessible it was through court records and town halls where the “effort and expense” of finding the information gave it protection.
The professor decided to pick Justice Scalia as the center of the project because of a speech the Justice gave earlier this year where he said that he was not bothered by the availability of personal information saying that he doesn’t “find that particularly offensive”.
Tell us what you think….did Reidenberg go too far?