Spider Letters go to Supreme Court

The Court of Appeal has ruled unlawful the move by the Attorney General to suppress the publication of Prince Charles letters. Judgment in full here. Guardian reported here.

Roy Greenslade assented to the judgement and said:

"If Prince Charles is not neutral then the public have a right to know."

Paul Tweed dissented, saying the decision represented an incursion into the privacy of Prince Charles. Archie Bland called it a matter of secrecy, not privacy. 

Refusal to release Charles' black spiders is not about privacy - it's about secrecy. Which is outrageous. Wrote this: http://t.co/D03lIA5JwU
— Archie Bland (@archiebland) March 17, 2014

However, we will not see Prince Charles' "spider letters" any time soon. The Attorney-General has taken leave to appeal  to the UK Supreme Court (@ukSupremeCourt). Attorney General Dominic Grieve said:

"We are very disappointed by the decision of the court. We will be pursuing an appeal to the Supreme Court in order to protect the important principles which are at stake in this case."

The history of privacy in US and UK

Jeff Jarvis (@JeffJarvis) (+Jeff Jarvis), author of 'What Would Google Do?' said at 2m45s into the video above and here:

"There are new morays and new norms that are being created. Technology always frightens us. We did not discuss a legal right to privacy in this nation until 1890 and it was because of the invention of the Kodak camera. Louis Brandeis and his co-author of the Harvard Law Review were frightened because Mr Warren's daughter's wedding had been photographed and the penny press was a way to expand that and we got very scared (see 1890 paper here). And what they came back to in the end, they couldn't find a right to privacy in the US Constitution. We have a right to publicness, it's the First Amendment, but not really a right to privacy. And whenever technology has come it involves change, and change unsettles us and we get scared of of that and then we look for all the bad things that can happen and we worry about it and we should because we should guard against cruelty and bad things that can happen. But we shouldn't manage our whole world around that."

Lord Neuberger, President of the UK Supreme Court, said of privacy in the UK in his address, 'British Law and European Law':