Privacy Law Commons^™

Katz On A Hot Tin Roof: The Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy Is Rudderless In The Digital Age Unless Congress Continually Resets The Privacy Bar, Charles E. Maclean

Charles E. MacLean

The Katz reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine has lasting relevance in the digital age, but that relevance must be carefully and clearly guided in great detail by Congressional and state legislative enactments continually resetting the privacy bar as technology advances. In that way, the Katz “reasonableness” requirements are actually set by the legislative branch, thereby precluding courts from applying inapposite analogies to phone booths, cigarette packs, and business records. Once legislation provides the new contours of digital privacy, those legislative contours become the new “reasonable.”

This article calls upon Congress, and to a lesser extent, state legislatures, to control that …

Our Records Panopticon And The American Bar Association Standards For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

"Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft." So concludes the main character in Dave Egger’s novel The Circle, in which a single company that unites Google, Facebook, and Twitter – and on steroids – has the ambition not only to know, but also to share, all of the world's information. It is telling that a current dystopian novel features not the government in the first instance, but instead a private third party that, through no act of overt coercion, knows so much about us. This is indeed the greatest risk to privacy in our day, both the unprecedented …

Immigration Policing And Federalism Through The Lens Of Technology, Surveillance, And Privacy, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

With the deployment of technology, federal programs to enlist state and local police assistance with immigration enforcement are undergoing a sea change. For example, even as it forcefully has urged invalidation of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 and similar state laws, the Obama administration has presided over the largest expansion of state and local immigration policing in U.S. history with its implementation of the “Secure Communities” program, which integrates immigration and criminal history database systems in order to automatically ascertain the immigration status of every individual who is arrested and booked by state and local police nationwide. By 2012, over one fifth …

Who Should Be The ‘Decider’ On Keeping Our Secrets?, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Addressing The Harm Of Total Surveillance: A Reply To Professor Neil Richards, Danielle Citron, David Gray

David C. Gray

In his insightful article The Dangers of Surveillance, 126 HARV. L. REV. 1934 (2013), Neil Richards offers a framework for evaluating the implications of government surveillance programs that is centered on protecting "intellectual privacy." Although we share his interest in recognizing and protecting privacy as a condition of personal and intellectual development, we worry in this essay that, as an organizing principle for policy, "intellectual privacy" is too narrow and politically fraught. Drawing on other work, we therefore recommend that judges, legislators, and executives focus instead on limiting the potential of surveillance technologies to effect programs of broad and indiscriminate …

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …

The Davis Good Faith Rule And Getting Answers To The Questions Jones Left Open, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Jones clearly established that use of GPS tracking surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. But the Court left many other questions unanswered about the nature and scope of the constitutional privacy right in location data. A review of lower court decisions in the wake of Jones reveals that, rather than begin to answer the questions that Jones left open, courts are largely avoiding substantive Fourth Amendment analysis of location data privacy. Instead, they are finding that officers who engaged in GPS tracking and related surveillance operated in good faith, based …

American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards On Law Enforcement Access To Third Party Records, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Expectations Of Privacy In Social Media, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

This article, which largely tracks my remarks at Mississippi College’s Social Media Symposium, examines expectations of privacy in social media such as weblogs (blogs), Facebook pages, and Twitter tweets. Social media is diverse and ever-diversifying, and while I address some of that complexity, I focus on the core functionality, which provides the groundwork for further conversation as the technology and related social norms develop. As one would expect, just as with our offline communications and other online communications, in some we have an expectation of privacy that is recognized by current law, in some we have an expectation of privacy …

Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Everyone who has been screened at an international border, scanned by an airport metal detector, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search. Since September 11th, the government has increasingly invoked the administrative search exception to justify more checkpoints, unprecedented subway searches, and extensive wiretaps. As science and technology advance, the frequency and scope of administrative searches will only expand. Formulating the boundaries and requirements of administrative search doctrine is therefore a matter of great importance. Yet the rules governing administrative searches are notoriously unclear. This Article seeks to refocus attention on administrative searches and …

The Timely Demise Of The Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

In what may be a slightly premature obituary, in this response to a forthcoming paper by Matthew Tokson I argue that the Fourth Amendment third party doctrine "has at least taken ill, and it can be hoped it is an illness from which it will never recover." It is increasingly unpopular as a matter of state constitutional law, has long been assailed in scholarship but now thoughtful alternatives are percolating, and it cannot – or at least should not – withstand the pressures which technology and social norms are placing upon it. Even the Supreme Court seems loath to defend …

Substitution Effects: A Problematic Justification For The Third-Party Doctrine Of The Fourth Amendment, Blake Ellis Reid

Publications

In the past half-century, the Supreme Court has crafted a vein of jurisprudence virtually eliminating Fourth Amendment protection in information turned over to third parties - regardless of any subjective expectation of privacy or confidentiality in the information on the part of the revealer. This so-called “third-party” doctrine of the Fourth Amendment has become increasingly controversial in light of the growing societal reliance on the Internet in the United States, where nearly every transaction requires a user to turn information over to at least one third party: the Internet service provider (“ISP”).

Citing the scholarship that has criticized the third-party …

Garbage Pails And Puppy Dog Tails: Is That What Katz Is Made Of?, Aya Gruber

Publications

This Article takes the opportunity of the fortieth anniversary of Katz v. U.S. to assess whether the revolutionary case's potential to provide broad and flexible privacy protection to individuals has been realized. Answering this question in a circumspect way, the Article pinpoints the language in Katz that was its eventual undoing and demonstrates how the Katz test has been plagued by two principle problems that have often rendered it more harmful to than protective of privacy. The manipulation problem describes the tendency of conservative courts to define reasonable expectations of privacy as lower than the expectations society actually entertains. The …

The Technology Of Surveillance: Will The Supreme Court's Expectations Ever Resemble Society's?, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Beyond The (Current) Fourth Amendment: Protecting Third-Party Information, Third Parties, And The Rest Of Us Too, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

For at least thirty years the Supreme Court has adhered to its third-party doctrine in interpreting the Fourth Amendment, meaning that so far as a disclosing party is concerned, information in the hands of a third party receives no Fourth Amendment protection. The doctrine was controversial when adopted, has been the target of sustained criticism, and is the predominant reason that the Katz revolution has not been the revolution many hoped it would be. Some forty years after Katz the Court's search jurisprudence largely remains tied to property conceptions. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, however, the doctrine is not the …

Constitutional Posture Of Canine Sniffs, Lina Shahin

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.