Linking new age to ageless rights

I'm nude, sunbathing in my backyard.

Bzzz ... here comes your drone, taking a good, long look.

Have you just violated my constitutional rights?

A police officer shoots a black man. The whole webbed, Internetted world instantly knows all about it. Can the officer possibly get a fair trial anywhere?

You really hate your high-school principal. So, in your own bedroom, you post on social media to call out his lunatic, ugly stench. Should your school be able to suspend you? Or would that trample your right to free speech?

I'm a police officer in a drug raid, and I catch you as the deal goes down. What's this? Why, your cellphone! Phone numbers, photos, email, evidence - but can I open it without a warrant?

James Madison could never have imagined our digital world. Yet we live by the Bill of Rights he helped create. The document upholds personal liberties, limits the power of government, and sorts out the rights of central and state governments. Can those hallowed amendments be sustained against the plangent chorus of the 24/7 info-saturated world?

On Thursday and Friday, experts, teachers, and lawyers will gather at the National Constitution Center to ask just that question, when the American Bar Association hosts "The Bill of Rights in a Digital Age." It's the group's annual National Law-Related Education Conference. Keynoters include Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsay, who also joins civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, documentarist Spencer Wolff, and others on a panel titled "Law Enforcement and Individual Rights in a Digital Age," and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, speaking on "Education for Democracy."

Part of the mission is to connect classroom and courthouse. Among the preconference programs is one in which high-school civics teachers visit the federal courthouse to learn more about how the courts work. Harry Johnson of Whiteford, Taylor & Preston L.L.P. in Baltimore chairs the committee organizing these events. "The whole point of what we do is education," he says. "We want civics teachers to take what they learn right back to their classrooms."

No one's talking about trashing the Bill of Rights. Rather, it's how we apply it to the world we have. It's a cliché that the Internet or Facebook or the communications age has "changed everything." But the law is where we take stock of what's really happening in our world, where we decide what we allow, what we don't, when we limit, when we punish - and when we do nothing. The Bill of Rights - it turns 225 late next year - encodes our values and aspirations, which each new technological wave challenges us to renew.

"It's not a question of transforming the Bill of Rights, but of translating it, shaping the way we apply it," says Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the Constitution Center. "Ours is an age of the mobile phone, the cloud, DNA mapping, surveillance cameras, Google Glass, genetic testing, facial recognition technology, and GPS tracking, all of which raise issues of privacy, surveillance - which is everywhere - and free speech. Google and Facebook have more power over matters once considered personal and private than any government. Police body cameras raise issues of policing, the common good, and public access. Drones are ubiquitous, with some police departments using them to track suspects. The challenge is to uphold and preserve what we have always valued in these new settings."

"Technology is changing at a pace that outstrips our ability to understand its implications," says Nisan Chavkin of the Constitutional Rights Foundation in Chicago. His session Friday is titled "Surveillance and Privacy in the 21st Century."

"The law always is playing catchup. We have to maintain our old ideas of rights and privacy while grappling with concepts such as virtual identity and semisentient capacities of algorithms."

Thanks to the all-access Web, personal info is bought and sold on a global market to ISP providers, governments, businesses, and insurers. We need to teach our children well. "Our children live in a world," Chavkin says, "where their e-profile is open to all these public and private entities."

"Search and Seizure: The Marvel of New Technology" is a Thursday session on the Fourth Amendment with Seth Nadler of Eisenberg & Baum L.L.P. in New York. He's the one who brings up cellphones and warrants. "We teach these matters by looking at how movies and other popular media treat them," he says. "What happens when police raid a crime lab or track your cellphone? Cameras are getting smaller, drones are more and more prevalent. Even the Apple Watch raises Fourth Amendment issues."

Deborah Crayter of the State Bar of Georgia will host a presentation titled " 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot!': Free Press or Fair Trial?" She will do a "what if?" in which Police Officer Darren Wilson is to be tried for the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. (Her title includes the slogan arising from demonstrations in Ferguson.) The question is: Could Wilson possibly get a fair trial?

Crayter will explore the collision between that right (the Sixth Amendment) and the right to a free press (the First Amendment). "At least since the trial of Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case, through the O.J. Simpson trial and others," she says, "media saturation has complicated fair-trial rights. In the digital age, all information is instantly available everywhere. Every locale is the same locale. How can we find an unbiased jury of peers? What can we do to preserve the right of defendants and maintain public confidence in the judicial system?"

Anastasia Gogol of the Boston-based court education project Discovering Justice will conduct "First Amendment, High School Students, and Social Media: When Is Speech Not Free?" on Thursday.

"At the outset, our students believe that free speech is all-encompassing and cannot be limited," Gogol says. "But as they work through cases, they realize the reasons for the qualifications that can attach to free speech."

That's where that social media story comes into play. Gogol will discuss two cases with different outcomes. In the 2006 circuit court case Layshock v. Hermitage School District, a student sued a Pennsylvania district that punished him for creating at home an online parody of his principal. In the 2011 case Kowalski v. Berkley County Schools, a student sued her West Virginia high school for expelling her after she made a MySpace page ridiculing another student. The first student won; the second didn't. Why? What were the differences? "Students can discuss these cases," Gogol says, "and understand that their rights are important but also subject to some limitations."

Comfortingly, the sense seems to be, as Chavkin says, that "the Bill of Rights can stand up under the onslaught of change." Our job as citizens, he says, is to "balance the facts of our world and the common goods we hold dear." Rosen calls it a "creative but very necessary exercise we do and must keep doing every day."

But we have to do the work and teach the kids. As Chavkin puts it: "It's like the Netherlands. There's the dike and there's the sea. You'd better pay attention to one, or the other will be on top of you."

jt@phillynews.com

215-854-4406@jtimpane

John Timpane will live-tweet sessions from the Constitution Center on Thursday and Friday.