Law Commons^™

Ring, Amazon Calling: The State Action Doctrine & The Fourth Amendment, Grace Egger

Washington Law Review Online

Video doorbells have proliferated across the United States and Amazon owns one of the most popular video doorbell companies on the market—Ring. While many view the Ring video doorbell as useful technology that protects the home and promotes safer neighborhoods, the product reduces consumer privacy without much recourse. For example, Ring partners with cities and law enforcement agencies across the United States thereby creating a mass surveillance network in which law enforcement agencies can watch neighborhoods and access Ring data without the user’s knowledge or consent. Because Amazon is not a state actor, it is able to circumvent the due …

Keeping The Zombies At Bay: Fourth Amendment Problems In The Fight Against Botnets, Danielle Potter

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

You may not have heard of a botnet. If you have, you may have linked it to election shenanigans and nothing else. But if you are reading this on a computer or smartphone, there is a good chance you are in contact with a botnet right now.

Botnets, sometimes called “Zombie Armies,” are networks of devices linked by a computer virus and controlled by cybercriminals. Botnets operate on everyday devices owned by millions of Americans, and thus pose a substantial threat to individual device owners as well as the nation’s institutions and economy.

Accordingly, the United States government has been …

Dna Is Different: An Exploration Of The Current Inadequacies Of Genetic Privacy Protection In Recreational Dna Databases, Jamie M. Zeevi

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Part I of this Note discusses the fundamental science behind DNA and defines and explains the process of familial DNA searching. Part I also discusses how Carpenter v. United States provides a framework to begin thinking about the unique nature of DNA and privacy implications for its use, and why the revealing nature of this type of data warrants protection. Part II of this Note delves into the lack of constitutional and statutory protections for DNA in recreational DNA databases. First, Part II explains that traditional Fourth Amendment concepts, like search warrants, probable cause, reasonable expectation of privacy, third-party …

The Fourth Amendment Inventory As A Check On Digital Searches, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Police and federal agents generally must obtain a warrant to search the tens of thousands of devices they seize each year. But once they have a warrant, courts afford these officers broad leeway to search the entire device, every file and folder, all metadata and deleted data, even if in search of only one incriminating file. Courts avow great reverence for the privacy of personal information under the Fourth Amendment but then claim there is no way to limit where an officer might find the target files, or know where the suspect may have hidden them.

These courts have a …

United States V. Touset, Katelyn James

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protecting Online Privacy In The Digital Age: Carpenter V. United States And The Fourth Amendment’S Third-Party Doctrine, Cristina Del Rosso, Carol M. Bast

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The goal of this paper is to examine the future of the third-party doctrine with the proliferation of technology and the online data we are surrounded with daily, specifically after the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States. It is imperative that individuals do not forfeit their Constitutional guarantees for the benefit of living in a technologically advanced society. This requires an understanding of the modern-day functional equivalents of “papers” and “effects.”

Looking to the future, this paper contemplates solutions on how to move forward in this technology era by scrutinizing the relevancy of the third-party doctrine due …

Privacy, Eavesdropping, And Wiretapping Across The United States: Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy And Judicial Discretion, Carol M. Bast

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

One-party consent and all-party consent eavesdropping and wiretapping statutes are two broad pathways for legislation to deal with the problem of secret taping and some states protect conversation under state constitutions. Whether a conversation is protected against being taped as a private conversation is often gauged by the reasonable expectation of privacy standard. Judges in both all-party consent and one-party consent jurisdictions have had to use their leeway under the reasonable expectation of privacy standard to arrive at what at the time seemed to be the most appropriate solution, perhaps in doing so creating a case law exception.