Privacy

Alan Westin, 83, one of the first and most widely respected scholars to explore the issues of privacy in the information age, died Monday at a hospice in Saddle River, N.J. He had cancer, his son, Jeremy Westin, said. A professor of public law and government, Mr. Westin taught at Columbia University for nearly four decades. Through his prolific academic writing and frequent media appearances, he became nationally known as one of the most knowledgeable, prescient, and reasonable voices on privacy questions in modern society.

IAM SICKENED by liberals using Planned Parenthood vs. Casey to attack Judge Samuel Alito. If a wife is pregnant, due to adultery, rape, or (gasp) even carrying his biological child, the husband has no right to know if she chooses to terminate? When a man has the right to refuse paternity tests, or to pay child support or alimony because disclosure of his income and assets are protected by the same right to privacy, let's see if these same talking heads stand up and defend him. Ray Markey, Haddon Heights, N.J.

A veteran Center City jeweler has been charged by police with invasion of privacy after three female employees said they found a hidden camera inside the store's bathroom. Benjamin Sorkin, 52, of the 9300 block of Laramie Road in Bustleton, surrendered to police Wednesday and was charged with three counts of invasion of privacy and one count of possessing an instrument of crime, according to Capt. John Darby of the Special Victims Unit. According to Philadelphia court records, Sorkin was released on $10,000 bail pending a preliminary hearing Tuesday at the Criminal Justice Center in Center City.

Do presidential candidates have the same rights to privacy as private citizens? Does the Senate have the right to reject a nominee to the Supreme Court based on political ideology? These are the kinds of questions the American people have been asking in the wake of Gary Hart's withdrawal from the Democratic race for president and in the midst of the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Robert Bork. They are the same questions Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor Michael Kammen tried to answer last week during a lecture at Episcopal Academy in Merion.

Palmer Farm Yardley, Bucks County 493-6500 Palmer Farm has been designed to appeal to a wide variety of home buyers, from the young professional couple who want to move up from a townhouse or condominium to an older couple who want to move into smaller quarters now that the children have left home. The developers of Palmer Farm say they have come up with a combination that will appeal to both. The homes at Palmer Farm are spacious, with formal living and dining rooms and a two-story entrance foyer.

Bill Clinton has been subjected to the most extreme invasion of privacy in human history. That sounds hyperbolic, but think about it. The details of his sex life have been the subject of public discussion for months and now are available in excruciating detail on the Internet, in newspapers and 24 hours a day on cable-news networks. Thanks to Kenneth Starr, you now know more about the President's sex life than you know about your best friend's. In fact, unless you have a very good memory, you may know more about Clinton's sex life than about your own. Partly, of course, this unbelievably intense violation is made possible by our current technologies for the dissemination of information.

You might think the senior editor and chief technical writer for Newsweek would have always been a techie. Not so with Steven Levy, author of Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government - Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (Viking, $25.95). "When I was at Temple, I got out of my science requirement by using some loophole to do independent study on rock music," the native Philadelphian said in a recent interview. But along the way, especially while writing about computers for Rolling Stone (which led to the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution)

WOODLAND RUN Mullica Hill, Gloucester County 609-478-6363 Builder Harold Basch Jr. has combined convenience and privacy at Woodland Run in Mullica Hill. The 24-acre development is close to major highways - including Routes 42, 55 and 322 and Interstate 295 - for quick access to Philadelphia, Wilmington and points in South Jersey. But the site is rural enough to offer peace and quiet. Each of the 33 single-family homes will be on at least one-half acre, providing even more privacy.

When the Philadelphia Gas Works sought to install automated meter-reading devices on its customers' telephones last year, opponents successfully blocked the plan. The ground? Invasion of privacy. When police in Washington, D.C., were found in November to be secretly testing recruits for pregnancy, civil libertarians were outraged. The issue again was privacy. Privacy was the defense claimed by presidential candidate Gary Hart when confronted with evidence of a liaison with a Miami model.

WASHINGTON — More than a third of Americans worry their privacy will suffer if drones like those used to spy on U.S. enemies overseas become the latest police tool for tracking suspected criminals at home, according to an Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll.   Congress has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to come up with safety regulations that will clear the way for routine domestic use of unmanned aircraft within the next three years. The government is under pressure from a wide range of interests to open U.S. skies to drones.