Guy Incognito
DP Veteran
- Joined
- May 14, 2010
- Messages
- 11,216
- Reaction score
- 2,846
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Libertarian
Or not
Property rights are not connected to "bodily sovereignty." Your having control over your own body has nothing to do with how property rights are construed in Western societies. My apartment is not a part of me, and I do not own it because I control my own body. Property rights are devised as a conceptual mean to control certain physical resources.
I do not "own" my email. In fact, if I use a commercial service like Gmail or Yahoo!, those companies actually own my email. My right to be protected from government supervision is not based on Yahoo's ownership of my emails, it's based on the idea that I, as a private citizen, have (limited) rights to privacy.
In fact, it's entirely conceivable to imagine having a right to privacy without a right to property. For example, you could live in a communal space such as a monastery, and still have an expectation of privacy.
You don't say
In some cases yes, in others no.
If the government has a warrant that specifies the data, then they have followed the law.
If the government hoovers up public data, they haven't violated your rights.
If the government records metadata on every single phone call made in the United States, that's very problematic.
If the government hooks up to the routers that carry most of the traffic on the Internet, and capture all your emails and Facebook posts and passwords, then we definitely have a problem.
On the contrary, property rights are derived from bodily sovereignty. Simply put, it is the right to self ownership which permits the right to one's labor. In turn, one mixes labor with natural resources to own property. The right to privacy does not exist. As somebody astutely observed above, privacy indirectly arises from property ownership. You can keep your property private if you want and if you can manage it. But it is not a right separate from the ownership of the property itself.