I'm Telling: The Conflicts of Privacy and a Free Press

So one of the things that wasn't immediately obvious to me before reading A Right to Privacy is the conflict of a free press and privacy. The best example I have of this is the paparazzi and celebrities. On a level most of us are more familiar we think of it as your best friend who told a secret you told them in 6^th grade. In both cases, information you would have rather kept secret is now very public. The question that this raises is what limits are there on the press' ability to print information (or someone's ability to speak information). In general we have laws that protect against the spreading of untruthful information (slander and liable) and this is one of the major differences between our sense of free speech and that in Britain (where if the speech causes economic harm, you are liable for it, even if it is true). So, there is “free speech”, but not “speech that is free from consequences”, if it is false. Well what if that “speech” is true, but obtained by questionable means? (eaves dropping on your phone calls, reading your emails, searching your trash, etc.) This is where we get into the insisting bits. It may be a low grade move to go ask your neighbors if they notice anything about you(such as John Ashcroft’s TIPS program), or intercept your Internet transmissions (such as the Carnivore System used by the FBI), but how do you protect such information (like being on a DC madam's call list http://www.dcphonelist.com/) or responding to an ad on CraigsList (http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/RFJason_CL_Experiment) from becoming public. In general we have the belief that information that we give away freely we don't have an expectation of privacy to but even that theory is flawed as in the case of your social security number to an employer or a tax return (one of the other factors is weather the information is considered of public interest which tends to have impact on celebrities but not on “regular folks”). So how do we draw the line? That is a question that is left up to our legislators. The press is, in most cases, not state run so the 4^th and 14^th amendments don't apply to it. In a society of totally free press and free information, there would be no secrets(think of an Orwellian dystopia where the govt. runs the newspaper). In a society with total privacy, there would be no freedom of speech (think of it like an extrapolated version of Cheney's energy commission).