Reporting on Surveillance

As I read the features on privacy in the Jan. 8 edition, all I could think about was my late roommate, Bob Capuano ’73, working diligently on his junior paper for his fall Woodrow Wilson School conference on “The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society.” Bob’s paper, along with those of classmates Steve Glauberman, Eric Vinson, Marilyn Green, Rich Nenno, Alex Hartnett, Betsy Freeman, Michael Theodore, Bob Wolf, and Mark Stevens, became the basis for the Alito Princeton Privacy Report.

This report was named after the senior, Sam Alito ’72, who chaired the conference and later became a Supreme Court justice. I am very proud of my classmates for being way ahead of their time in analyzing issues such as “Federal Agencies Involved in Domestic Surveillance” and “Technology and the Control of Stored Data.” Pretty heady work for a bunch of 20-year-olds in 1971.