On this logic, political speech design to "imperil the foundational principles ... that the First Amendment sits atop" should also no longer enjoy the protection of strict scrutiny. But that's not "the traditions of our people and our law," as it were.

You have seen clearly the tension between protecting the rights to learn, to think, and to speak and the protection of individual privacy against people who learn, think, and sell the results of their thinking about others. Whether the particular case of Clearview AI deserves the illustrative prominence you give it depends not on whether they are sleazy, which they are, but on how clearly the principles in conflict can be seen from a single illustration.

The route to improvement here, I think, is to honor fully the complexity of the phenomenon. As you rightly say, the US First Amendment is a deregulatory principle: that's what happens when Congress is told to make no law, while other societies are busily making laws that Congress and the State legislatures clearly cannot make.

But perhaps the issue isn't whether the First Amendment over-protects freedom of thought against privacy regulation. Perhaps the question is instead how to make privacy regulation consistent with the overarching commitment to freedom of thought. That would be the problem, at any rate, for those whose commitments to both are very strong, and who therefore are likely to reject an approach that requires them to be in conflict unnecessarily. That's my situation, just to take one guy at random, so in the next course I have to do that work. Wherever you want to take this essay, I hope that I will be able to respond to it, and to keep the conversation growing, in Part One of CPC.