The Natural Rights Of Property And Privacy

The Natural Right to Property is that it is your possession so you have the right to do with it as you will. This includes limiting or eliminating others use of your property. The limit to your right of property is that the natural law rule, which is that liberty does not justify license, still applies to it. Property is a person, place, thing, or ideal. Some examples of property are your body , parts of your body, information about your body, information you posses about you, .your artwork, your inventions, your house, your land, and much, much more. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments address the balance between the need to establish justice and the right to property ,

The Natural Right of Privacy is an aspect of property as you have the right to hide or conceal anything you posses. Thus you build a privacy fence to shield your yard or you have to give permission before doctors can share your files with other medical facilities. The Fourth Amendment addresses this right of privacy balanced by the need to establish justice by forbidding unreasonable searches without a lawful warrant.

One legal challenges to the right to privacy is whether the exudation from your property can be available to all comers. Thus if a helicopter flies over your house, do they have the right to take a picture of you in your back yard. Does anyone have the right to take a “picture” of the heat radiated from your house. What about using ultra sensitive microphones to pick up sounds that originate within your property. The courts have a doctrine in this case that is called expectation of privacy in which if you can reasonably expect privacy in a situation then the government has no right to invade that privacy without due process of law. This is justified because the government is using unnatural means to search the property . The unnatural means in the examples I gave was technology, even when the searching device is not located on the property itself.

While your privacy is protected from intentional attempt to breach it, it is not protected from unintentional attempts. That is because the earlier is searching, while the later is not. For example you are in an airport and your luggage is knocked over and breaks open displaying the contents for all to see you in which case you cannot reasonably expect privacy. Then take the case of an amateur scientist using sensitive mikes whom inadvertently picks up conversations from your house. In the second case the results from the use of the mikes was unintentional so the breach of privacy was no different than in the first case.