The subject matter of this article is, at bottom, a practical problem. It accepts that people have a right to privacy and that this right should find proper protection in the law. It asks, simply, whether such protection is at all feasible given the particular technology of broadcast by satellite.
For the purposes of investigating this problem several issues must be addressed. First is the nature of the violation of privacy involved. Our concern here is principally with TV news broadcasts. We begin from the point where the debate over “what is in the public interest versus what the public is interested in” has ended; there will be general consensus that the content of a certain broadcast represents a violation of an individual's privacy and one about which the law should do something. An example might be the filming in the public domain of a private individual caught in the shock of personal grief or tragedy. In such a case we would need to investigate the nature of the injury involved in any subsequent broadcast of these sounds and images, and to ask what dimension, if any, is added to this injury by their simultaneous broadcast across the globe.