Supreme Court to Decide Case Involving ‘Right of Informational Privacy’: Via News - ABA Journal.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the First Amendment protects demands for personal information from government contract workers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The case asks whether the Constitution protects a “right of informational privacy,” SCOTUSblog reports. “The Supreme Court mentioned such a right in a 1977 decision, and has seldom mentioned it since,” the blog says.

The case could affect how the federal government investigates the background of its employees, the Associated Press reports. The NASA workers challenging background checks say the government sought information about subjects ranging from their finances to their sex lives. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, on the other hand, argues there is no violation by collecting, rather than disseminating, the information.

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“Is there a constitutional right to informational privacy? Thirty-two terms ago, the Supreme Court hinted that there might be and has never said another word about it,” Kozinski wrote. “With no Supreme Court guidance except this opaque fragment, the courts of appeals have been left to develop the contours of this free-floating privacy guarantee on their own. It’s a bit like building a dinosaur from a jawbone or a skull fragment, and the result looks more like a turducken. We have a grab bag of cases on specific issues, but no theory as to what this right (if it exists) is all about.”

A turducken is a chicken stuffed into a duck that is stuffed into a turkey.

The case is NASA v. Nelson.

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