1 comments

  • toomuchtodo 2 hours ago ago

    This will be the only path to success, putting elected reps under the same microscope they put their constituents with corporate surveillance apparatus.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bork_tapes

    > The Bork tapes were a series of 146 videotapes rented out by Robert Bork, then a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, from Potomac Video in Washington, D.C. He had been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Ronald Reagan on July 1, 1987. His contentious confirmation hearings made him a subject of intense media scrutiny, based especially on his views concerning privacy in the Constitution. Michael Dolan, a writer at the Washington City Paper who frequented the same video rental store, became aware of Bork's visits and obtained his rental history from store management.

    > On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. The subsequent leakage and coverage of the tapes resulted in Congress passing the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which forbids the sharing of video tape rental information, amidst a bipartisan consensus on intellectual privacy. Proponents of the VPPA, including Senator Patrick Leahy, contended that the leakage of Bork's tapes was an outrage. The bill was passed in just over a year after the incident.

    > After the publication of "The Bork Tapes", members of Congress voiced concerns about the ease with which public figures' video history could be revealed. The Video Privacy Protection Act, often called "the Bork Bill", was quickly passed. It applied some of the United States' highest privacy protections to video rental records and imposed heavy civil liability on violators. Reflecting on his story's impact a year later, Dolan wrote: "In a single scoop I created a nonrecurring problem—and a cottage legislative industry designed to solve it. What really hurts is that they're calling the statutory offspring of my little prank the 'Bork Bills,' when they ought to be the Dolan Amendments."