Freedom to privacy, in the land of free speech?

By Kimberly Katz
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McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum

Today I visited the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum located on Michigan Avenue in the historic Tribune Tower. This is really a wonderful, must see exhibit for young people where "they will be inspired to better understand freedom and value the role the First Amendment plays in protecting freedom for future generations."

I particularly enjoyed the "Hit List" exhibit where you hear songs that have been "challenged" and banned over the last fifty years. You can also be a part of the exhibit along with local and national celebrities, by recording our own thoughts on freedom for all to see and hear. Kids will enjoy staring into a mirror, next to past president's portraits that declares, "The Next President of the United States... It Could Be You!"

The exhibits seemingly cover in detail just about every group that has fought for freedom and civil rights in this country, including women's right to vote and secure abortion rights, black's right to desegregate schools, the Native American's struggle to secure lands, and the immigrant's rights to enter the country. Also included in this exhibit were our forefathers and mothers who authored the constitution, Bill of Rights and important nation changing documents like Thomas Paine's, "Common Sense."

You will even learn little known, surprising facts about which nations have a free press at present, and which don't. Also, I didn't know about how Abraham Lincoln used his powers to shut down or jail employees of nearly a hundred newspapers during the Civil War and that he was not the only U.S. president to do so.

However there is one right you will not see featured or explained in this extensive exhibit, your civil right to privacy. Could it be because this museum was created originally by The Chicago Tribune newspaper? As a journalist I sincerely appreciate the supportive way this museum portrays writers and journalists in general and their lifelong sacrifices for freedom in this country, in specific, including the times journalists have received the Pulitzer Prize. However, as a private citizen it disturbs me greatly that there is nothing displayed about the civil right that makes all the other hard won rights meaningful.

I believed that the tragic and horrific loss of Princess Diana, both a highly protected political figure and a celebrity in her own right, would have instigated some real change in legislation regarding attention to the civil right to privacy in this country but it hasn't.

The etymological origin of the word celebrity means, "to celebrate". The line between famous people who because of their good works were meant to be honored and celebrated and the infamous criminals, who have done something to be reviled for, has become dangerously blurred. The current media, Internet and surveillance technology explosion allows violations of privacy like never before in the history of recorded time and we must demand that our government begin to legislate against this dangerous trend.

Instead, to the contrary, the U.S. government is already creating a National ID card that will have ALL of your personal information - banking, medical, job history, purchases made, when and where you traveled - everything! It will also have the potential to track and record literally every move you make. In time, you will not even be allowed to board a plane to travel unless you have one. The N.S.A., considered a myth just 15 years ago, already has a program called Echelon that tracks every email you send and every phone call you make. They are already testing a microchip ID, the V-Chip, to be implanted under your skin. You may think you are an untouchable, a fine upstanding citizen with nothing to hide, but have you ever signed a petition for clean air, or attended a demonstration for peace that seemed to go against the government's stand on war at the time? You can be made a target by our government through the Patriot Act for an endless list of seemingly innocuous reasons and then monitored without your knowledge in your own home.

As far as celebrities, I feel sickened when I hear an actor saying something like, "Well, it goes with the territory, and I have to put up with this for the rest of my life because I chose acting as a career." That's like a battered housewife claiming she deserves to be punched because she married the wrong person. No one deserves to be stalked and harassed and pursued to the point of endangering his or her life or their children's lives because of their career choice. Poverty, loneliness, rejection, those are the things that often go along with choosing a life in the arts, but having total strangers violate your privacy hourly by using technology that didn't even exist five years ago and making billions of dollars off your hard won image without ever compensating you - the owner of those images - does not go along with the territory of a life in the arts. It's a terrifying message to give to young people that if they finally succeed at selling those Hip Hop CD's or making that award winning independent film, that they somehow deserve a life of legalized harassment and endangerment at the hands of a handful of tabloid owners and their employees.

Prejudice against the theatre community and actors themselves originated with the church during the dark ages when touring bands of performers were declared demonic and labeled as easy targets for hatred. Artists of all kinds from Passion play performers to composers and painters originally commissioned by royalty and the church were hunted down and killed because of their enormous and increasingly threatening power to educate and trance/form the minds of the masses. Because actors and actresses "toured" the country like gypsies, the church declared them whores and vagabonds, non-tax paying citizens, and claimed their crimes included purveying anti-religious and anti-governmental blasphemy.

Somehow because of the voracious appetite of the modern public for news of heroes and heroines, and hence the enormous profit margins inherent in stolen photos and video, this prejudice and hatred has been readily translated and propagandized as the modern idea that performers of all kinds are still second-class citizens who are legally entitled to less than their share of civil rights. There is an old saying, "Where is it written?" as in "Prove it to me, where is this law written down?" I'd like to see where it is written.. Where is the legal precedent that once a person like John Travolta, or Madonna or Bill Gates sells a certain number of computer or DVD products or CD's of their music that they have somehow legally given up and permanently lost some portion of their civil right to privacy?

Some people will say, "Who cares about that tiny little minority of famous artists, actors and business people. I will never be rich and famous. My family and I have nothing to worry about". But they forget with the advent of micro video recorders, high-powered telephoto lenses and even cameras linked to satellites, all combined with the Internet that you too could be famous in your hometown, and not in a way that you would enjoy. For example, if someone took pictures of your children playing in your swimming pool and sold them on the Internet to pedophiles you would correctly feel that your children had, in fact, been physically molested by this act of being observed and photographed without their knowledge and then, in addition, molested again by the public who purchased these photos and exploited in a terrible way for financial gain. If someone like Jennifer Aniston or Jackie Onassis was photographed while sunbathing topless on private property by someone with a telephoto lens: has she not been similarly molested, actually sexually molested, abused and exploited financially by such an act?

If there is one important thing the Jewish people learned from the techniques of the Nazi government, it is the strategy to divide and conquer. When the Nazi's began their reign of terror and elimination, they came first for one small group, some fringe group that the upper middle class Jewish doctors and professors felt they were not a part of, like the pre-war gay population, or the radical, outspoken and typically penniless artists, but eventually the Nazi's came back with excuses for why they needed to control and eliminate the rest of us upstanding citizens.

The next time you see a celebrity suing over photos taken without their permission or trying to legislate a boundary of safe area around their own bodies and families to travel in without constant harassment and danger, don't laugh and say, "That will never happen to me". Ask not for whom the death knell bell of your privacy and freedom tolls, it tolls for thee.