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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

I find it Ironic that the dean at Harvard has the fortitude to step down when he's caught red-handed violating the civil and constitutional rights of his employees (and yes I recognize that working for someone is not the same as being a citizen of a country), yet our elected leaders, when caught authorizing far more heinous eavesdropping, do nothing, not even so much as apologizing.

Whereas an institution MIGHT be able to justify such egregious violations of privacy, a government can have no such moral quandaries because of the exacting detail of our laws; and yet, here we are.

Steal a little and they call you a thief. Steal a lot and they call you King.

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"he's caught red-handed violating the civil and constitutional rights of his employees"

Dean Hammonds is a woman.

Ouch. Well I'll let my foolish, unresearched commentary stand as a monument to my failure :(. Thanks for the correction though!!

Searches of e-mails are not clearly unconstitutional under our laws.

Furthermore the constitution protects you from the government. It doesn't protect you from a private entity like Harvard.

While this is true, I find it to only be true under the guise of tortured logic (emails left on my server are hardly the same as abandoned mail).

That being said, I wasn't trying to draw a direct comparison, and I realize that an employment contract has nothing to do with the constitution. My point was that someone lost their job while holding themselves to the standards of an employment contract which one would assume would be more lenient than our constitution (and in my reading it is but that's a topic for another day).

In short, I agree with your point but I think it's tangential to mine.

Why would an academic employment contract be more lenient than the Constitution? The Constitution is a floor, not a bar to reach for. It's a mistake to read modern libertarian (little "l") ideas into the Constitution. While there has been a change through history in which of the federal versus state governments has exercised the police power, the Constitution has always served as a check on an otherwise expansive power. It's easy to forget that all the founders' talk of "limited government" was aimed at the states, not citizens, and referred to the federal government specifically, not the federal, state, and local governments together. The states were conceived of as inheriting the nearly unlimited powers of the British Parliament. The innovation of the U.S. was not to dramatically limit the state, but to put a powerful state under majoritarian control, with a limited set of protections from abuse.

The circle back on topic: there is nothing within the worldview of the Constitution that is inconsistent with a certain activities being allowed of the government that are outside the powers of an individual. You can argue about which entity is the right one to exercise it, but the government is supposed to have more expansive powers than any person.

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