So a person loses their right to privacy when enough strangers take an interest in them?
Nakamoto barely provided Newsweek with any information at all. The rest was obtained (possibly illegally?) by snatching his email from a website he had done business with. After that, she pretended to have an interest in trains to spark a conversation and get initial information. She then stalked him and interviewed his family.
You don't have a right to privacy. Perhaps you should, and I've argued in favor of a constitutional amendment to that effect, but in the meantime privacy is just a polite social fiction.
It's more than a polite social fiction. It's a moral requirement for many of the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution to have any meaning. E.g. try exercising your right to an attorney when the prosecution logs all your communications. Or try exercising your right of assembly to discussion union membership while your employer monitors the meeting. If Americans give up on privacy and decide it's not worth fighting for, they will eventually cede the rest of their rights as well. There are simply too many powerful interests with strong incentives to create a world without a right to privacy.
And the legal scope of those situations is correspondingly narrow. I'm not against a right to privacy, which is why I said I'm in favor of a constitutional amendment to make it explicit. I'm saying that you don't have a comprehensive right to privacy now. Moral rights are what you want, legal rights are what you actually have.
I don't thinkt eh right to privacy is entirely unilateral; if it were, journalism could not exist, and the Constitution also forbids the government from abridging the freedom of the press - which includes the freedom to inquire as well as to publish. I personally would narrow the scope of press freedom if I were drafting constitution 2.0, because I believe publishers often exploit the economic asymmetry between themselves and their subjects to the detriment of ordinary people in a manner that the framers of the constitution were unable to envision, but there you go.
> " Moral rights are what you want, legal rights are what you actually have."
This sounds like a purely philosophical disagreement, so I won't pursue it much. From a practical perspective, I partially agree with you. A right without any teeth to back it up isn't much use in practice. In constitutional forms of government, it's the law that provides the teeth (as law ultimately devolves into a question of how and when force can be used, and against whom). But a more cynical perspective is that the teeth are all that really matter, and the moral arguments are all justifications for getting teeth in the first place. It's that latter, more cynical perspective that I am opposed to.
> So a person loses their right to privacy when enough strangers take an interest in them?
Depends on why strangers take an interest in them. I think it is reasonable to say that Nakamoto has made himself a public figure [1], so journalists should be able to research them within the confines of the law.
Nakamoto barely provided Newsweek with any information at all. The rest was obtained (possibly illegally?) by snatching his email from a website he had done business with. After that, she pretended to have an interest in trains to spark a conversation and get initial information. She then stalked him and interviewed his family.