The Telemarketing Invasion
Though the telephone has allowed us to “reach out and touch” each other, the contact isn’t always welcome.
Telephone lines now cross political, cultural and racial lines to link millions of Americans in a common disdain for telemarketers. Compounding the frustration, calls to silence their invasive rings keep getting disconnected.Even Alexander Graham Bell has fallen in the ratings. While legend has it that a March 10, 1876, lab spill led him to yell for help in what became the first phone call, conspiracy theorists question whether his pleas to Thomas Watson were truly accidental:
Bell: Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!
Watson: Yes, this is Mr. Watson. You want what?
Bell: I want you to come here and explore our exciting new long-distance plans.
Watson: Are you on acid or something? We don’t want any.
Bell: Actually, I just spilled some acid and it’s all over me. But, anyway, your friends and family can—Watson: Listen pal, my family is eating dinner. We’re on a “Do Not Call” list, so you don’t even have the right to call here!
Bell: But, Mr. Watson, this is freedom of speech. I have a constitutional right to call you.
Watson: Oh, yeah. Well, I’m calling my lawyer!
Only 14 years after Bell and Watson invented the telephone, two lawyers fueled this debate by discovering something equally revolutionary — the right of privacy.
In an 1890 Harvard Law Review article, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis urged courts to protect us from the intrusions of 19th-century technology. Advocating a “right to be let alone,” they complained that “modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon [man’s] privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.” (4 Harv. L. Rev. 193) .
Although Warren and Brandeis gave birth to modern privacy law, the slow wheels of justice have hardly kept pace with the rapid growth of modern technology. As computerized dialers let telemarketers annoy more people per minute than ever before, millions have exercised their “right to be let alone” through lists bearing the bold message: “Do Not Call.”
Telemarketers got a very different message when one federal judge disregarded consumer privacy and misconstrued the First Amendment as a license to invade it. Departing from U.S. Supreme Court precedent which already lets us block unwanted junk mail, Judge Edward Nottingham somehow viewed the unwelcome calls of telemarketers as an exercise of “free speech.”
Having placed the privacy of 50 million infuriated Americans “on hold,” Judge Nottingham’s own telephone must be ringing off the hook with the free speech of his critics. But, if this Denver jurist’s legal calls are ultimately transferred to Washington, the Supreme Court would do well to echo the views of Justice Louis Brandeis and “reverse the charges.”