ABSTRACT
This chapter considers ethical issues relating to politicians’ privacy. It argues against the standard framing of this topic, which typically weighs politicians’ private interests against the public interest. In the idealist’s view of the journalistic profession, politicians are cast as the villains of the democratic process, the tangible result of Lord Acton’s warning that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. According to the dystopian view, journalists and their bosses make no distinction between information that should be made public on the grounds of public interest and information which politicians should have the right to keep private. The dystopian view further imagines a media that seeks to achieve unfettered access to information about politicians’ lives and uses that information to manipulate those politicians. In “Just Surveillance: Towards a Normative Theory of Surveillance”, Kevin Macnish draws on the just war tradition to propose the following principles of just surveillance: just cause, correct intention, proper authority, necessity, and so on.
