Young Alito Defended
Privacy, Gay Rights
By AP from the
NYTimes on the Web, November 3, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov.2 -- In
college, Samuel Alito led a student conference that urged legalization of sodomy
and curbs on domestic intelligence, a sweeping defense of privacy rights he said
were under threat by the government and the dawning computer age.
President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before
ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it is
now, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting
data on individuals.
Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on
behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that ''no private sexual act
between consenting adults should be forbidden.'' Alito also called for an
end to discrimination against homosexuals in hiring.
As a federal appellate judge, Alito has built a scant record on gay-rights
issues and a mixed one, at best, on privacy matters generally, in the view of
civil liberties advocates who are still examining his opinions.
But they saw in the 1971 report a prescient thinker taking on issues ahead of
their time, including the need for computer encryption, stronger oversight of
domestic intelligence and curbs on the surveillance powers of states.
''The document itself is amazing,'' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center. ''It is a dramatic statement in
support of the right of privacy.
''Nonetheless,'' Rotenberg went on, ''his decisions as an appellate judge over
the last 15 years do raise some significant concerns about his willingness to
apply Fourth Amendment privacy standards.'' Rotenberg cited an example in
which Alito appeared to support the strip search of two people involved in an
authorized search but not named in a warrant.
The college report was first reported in The Boston Globe.
The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates gay rights, said the report gives
senators the basis to question Alito on that subject and privacy matters broadly
in his confirmation hearings.
''If these are his views today -- and there is no indication they are not --
it's a hopeful sign that may provide some insight into his philosophy,'' said
David Smith, the group's policy vice president. ''This isn't
pop-the-champagne-cork time. His views need to be explored.''
Even so, Smith was struck that Alito's report would raise a subject few tackled
back then, and come down so unequivocally on it. ''Very few people were
standing up for gay Americans 34 years ago,'' he said.
Harriet Miers, whose withdrawal from contention led to Alito's nomination, had
gone on record in 1989 as favoring equal civil rights for gays but opposing
repeal of the Texas anti-sodomy law, since overturned by the Supreme Court.
Smith said that in comparison with Miers' known views on gay rights, ''Alito
wins and it isn't by a nose.''
Alito is listed on the paper as the chairman of the conference, entitled the
Boundaries of Privacy in American Society, and author of the report's seven-page
summary of findings. It was done for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs. Alito was a senior acting as a
''commissioner'' for the undergraduates in his group.
Mark Dwyer, a college roommate of Alito's, said such class projects were
typically ''one of those academic exercises of 'let's pretend in the real
world.'''
Rotenberg said the report sounds much like one produced later by a national
committee drawn together by that era's Health, Education and Welfare Department.
Recommendations in that report became the basis of the landmark 1974 Privacy
Act.
''A lot in this paper is surprisingly forward-looking,'' he said.
In it, the young Alito writes that the Census Bureau should be barred from
asking unnecessarily intrusive questions, federal privacy ombudsmen should be
appointed and the government should face strict conditions for keeping and
distributing dossiers on citizens.
Much as privacy-savvy Web sites today promise not to disseminate personally
identifiable information, Alito said the government should limit its use of
information on individuals to ''bulk statistics.''
''The cybernetic revolution has greatly magnified the threat to privacy today,''
he said.
In one recommendation that was commonly debated at the time but a nonstarter
today, he said all computer systems should be licensed by the federal
government.
The report, two years before Roe v. Wade affirmed a constitutional right
to abortion, does not address that subject. Abortion-rights supporters
consider that right to be a fundamental matter of privacy.
As an appeals court judge, he held that states can require women seeking
abortions to notify their spouses. The Supreme Court disagreed.
Also on the bench, Alito supported a high school student who was taunted because
he was perceived as gay, and a family seeking to adopt an HIV-positive child.
The adoption had been challenged on grounds that the child posed a medical
threat to the family's other child.
Alito also, however, wrote the majority opinion in a 1999 decision overturning a
school district's wide-ranging anti-harassment policy, ruling in favor of
Christian students who wanted to preach against homosexuality.
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Associated Press writer Rosa Cirianni in
Princeton, N.J., contributed to this report.
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