Privacy in Public:A Democratic Defense

Traditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionallypublic activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. Inthis article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of inten-tionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that thiscontext provides, namely democratic legitimacy. Combining insights from HelenNissenbaum’s contextualism and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere,I argue that strategic surveillance of the public sphere can undermine thecapacity of citizens to freely deliberate in public and therefore conflicts withdemocratic self-determination