Recently in Government Category

Most Americans believe in a constitutional right to privacy -- but does it really exist? The answer is yes, but it's not as clear-cut as most people think.

In early 2003, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania announced his belief that no American has a Constitutional right to privacy, a shocking assertion to hear from a high government official. Because this was inserted as an aside in a more controversial statement, it was mostly overlooked -- but not entirely.

Pundits have been weighing in the subject sporadically ever since. The dismaying fact is, Santorum was right -- to a certain extent. There's no specific mention of the word "privacy" anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. But that doesn't mean that the subject isn't covered there, and it's time that myth was busted.

If you're a writer, you need to know your copyrights -- and your copyright myths.

Copyright myths are surprisingly abundant, even among writers, publishers, and other wordsmiths. They tend to be based either on out-of-date facts, or simple confusion with somewhat different concepts. In this article, we'll take a close look at five myths about the magical copyright, and reveal the truth about each.

While you can expect a legal right to privacy in regards to your snail mail, email privacy is another thing altogether.

Email privacy myths are among the most persistent of the Information Age. They tend to linger, even as more people come to realize that, given the insecurity of the World Wide Web and other forms of electronic information exchange, very little of our personal information is truly confidential anymore.

We Americans expect that our postal mail will remain absolutely private, because that's a right guaranteed by the Constitution. We tend to extend that assumption to electronic mail, too; but the fact is, you just can't have the same expectation of privacy with email as you do with "snail" mail. In this article, we'll explain why.