Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Abolish Anonymous Reporting To Child Abuse Hotlines, Dale Margolin Cecka

Catholic University Law Review

All states allow the public to anonymously report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to a toll free central phone number. An extensive examination of the policy and practices behind anonymous reporting hotlines indicates that they are widely unregulated and susceptible to abuse. The possible repercussions of an anonymous phone call create costs to the family and society which do not outweigh the potential benefit of allowing anonymous public reports. Under the guise of protecting children, the law has developed in such a way that it infringes on the fundamental rights of parents and children. At the same time, anonymous ...

Section 702 And The Collection Of International Telephone And Internet Content, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the NSA to collect the electronic communications of non-U.S. targets located overseas. Recent media reports and declassified documents reveal a more extensive program than publicly understood. The article begins by considering the origins of the current programs and the relevant authorities, particularly the transfer of part of the post-9/11 President’s Surveillance Program to FISA. It outlines the contours of the 2007 Protect America Act, before its replacement in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). The section ends with a brief discussion of the current state of ...

Constitutional Culpability: Questioning The New Exclusionary Rules, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Florida Law Review

This Article addresses the questions left unanswered by the Supreme Court’s recent exclusionary rule cases. The Hudson-Herring-Davis>/i> trilogy presents a new and largely unexamined doctrinal landscape for Fourth Amendment suppression hearings. Courts, litigators, and scholars are only now assessing what has changed on the ground in trial practice. Once an automatic remedy for any constitutional violation, the exclusionary rule now necessitates a separate and more searching analysis. Rights and remedies have been decoupled, such that a clear Fourth Amendment constitutional violation may not lead to the exclusion of evidence. Instead, it now leads to an examination of the ...

Hassle, Jane Bambauer

Michigan Law Review

Before police perform a search or seizure, they typically must meet the probable cause or reasonable suspicion standard. Moreover, even if they meet the appropriate standard, their evidence must be individualized to the suspect and cannot rely on purely probabilistic inferences. Scholars and courts have long defended the distinction between individualized and purely probabilistic evidence, but existing theories of individualization fail to articulate principles that are descriptively accurate or normatively desirable. They overlook the only benefit that the individualization requirement can offer: reducing hassle. Hassle measures the chance that an innocent person will experience a search or seizure. Because some ...

Social Media And The Workplace: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Privacy Settings And The Nlrb, Kathleen Carlson

Florida Law Review

Social media has permeated every aspect of society. The use of social media can easily lead to issues in an employment law context when employees suffer adverse employment actions based on the information they choose to share via their personal social media websites. Today’s laws concerning online privacy are in a nebulous state and have led some observers to suggest that employees who use social media may not find adequate legal protection from wrongful termination. This Note refutes this contention by analyzing current laws that may protect employees from adverse employment actions due to their use of social media ...

Lawlessness Breeds Lawlessness: A Case For Applying The Fourth Amendment To Extraterritorial Searches, Amy E. Pope

Florida Law Review

This official statement of the U.S. government’s strategy toward transnational organized crime recognizes a developing phenomenon: the maturation of criminal networks that increasingly know no boundaries. From narcotics trafficking to money laundering to human smuggling and cybercrime, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations transcend national frontiers effortlessly, destabilize business and state infrastructures, and leave countless victims in their wake. If nation–states are to keep pace with criminal networks, they must transcend their own frontiers. The more individual nations—particularly smaller countries in the immediate path of these criminal networks—are boxed in by fixed notions of sovereignty, the more ...

Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy Settings: Social Media And The Stored Communications Act, Christopher J. Borchert, Fernando M. Pinguelo, David Thaw

Duke Law & Technology Review

In 1986, Congress passed the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) to provide additional protections for individuals’ private communications content held in electronic storage by third parties. Acting out of direct concern for the implications of the Third-Party Records Doctrine—a judicially created doctrine that generally eliminates Fourth Amendment protections for information entrusted to third parties—Congress sought to tailor the SCA to electronic communications sent via and stored by third parties. Yet, because Congress crafted the SCA with language specific to the technology of 1986, courts today have struggled to apply the SCA consistently with regard to similar private content sent ...

Epilogue: Moral Panics And Body Cameras, Howard M. Wasserman

Washington University Law Review Commentaries

This brief follow-up to Moral Panics and Body Cameras comments on in the weeks after that essay was published on the Commentaries website and what those events show about the efficacy of body cameras and video evidence as a response to police-public conflicts.

Consequence, Weapons Of Mass Destruction, And The Fourth Amendment's "No-Win" Scenario, Scott J. Glick

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Furtive Encryption: Power, Trusts, And The Constitutional Cost Of Collective Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

Indiana Law Journal

Recent revelations of heretofore secret U.S. government surveillance programs have sparked national conversations about their constitutionality and the delicate balance between security and civil liberties in a constitutional democracy. Among the revealed policies asserted by the National Security Agency (NSA) is a provision found in the “minimization procedures” required under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. This provision allows the NSA to collect and keep indefinitely any encrypted information collected from domestic communications—including the communications of U.S. citizens. That is, according to the U.S. government, the mere fact that a U.S ...

Welcome To The Machine: Privacy And Workplace Implications Of Predictive Analytics, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

Predictive analytics use a method known as data mining to identify trends, patterns, or relationships among data, which can then be used to develop a predictive model. Data mining itself relies upon big data, which is “big” not solely because of its size but also because its analytical potential is qualitatively different. “Big data” analysis allows organizations, including government and businesses, to combine diverse digital datasets and then use statistics and other data mining techniques to extract from them both hidden information and surprising correlations. These data are not necessarily tracking transactional records of atomized behavior, such as the purchasing ...

High Technology, Consumer Privacy, And U.S. National Security, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Documents released over the past year detailing the National Security Agency’s (“NSA”) telephony metadata collection program and interception of international content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) implicated U.S. high technology companies in government surveillance. The result was an immediate, and detrimental, impact on U.S. corporations, the economy, and U.S. national security.

The first Snowden documents, printed on June 5, 2013, revealed that the government had served orders on Verizon, directing the company to turn over telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The following day, The Guardian published classified slides detailing ...

Bulk Telephony Metadata Collection And The Fourth Amendment: The Case For Revisiting The Third-Party Disclosure Doctrine In The Digital Age, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 191 (2015), Timothy Geverd

The John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

This Article argues that federal courts should seize the opportunity presented by the Snowden leaks to reexamine the continued vitality of the current third-party disclosure doctrine in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Specifically, this Article argues that Smith v. Maryland simply cannot continue to act as the “North Star” for judges navigating the “Fourth Amendment waters” of the digital age, and that instead, Smith should apply more narrowly in the digital age. In so arguing, this Article advocates that courts apply a modified, twostep test to evaluating third-party disclosures rather than applying the traditional binary rubric that courts have drawn from Smith ...

Regulating Drones Under The First And Fourth Amendments, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai, Marc Jonathan Blitz, James Grimsley

Stephen E Henderson

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 requires the Federal Aviation Administration to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into the national airspace system by September of this year. Yet perhaps because of their chilling accuracy in targeted killings abroad, perhaps because of an increasing consciousness of diminishing privacy more generally, and perhaps simply because of a fear of the unknown, divergent UAV-restrictive legislation has been proposed in Congress and enacted in a number of states. Ultimately, given UAV utility and cost effectiveness over a vast range of tasks, widespread commercial use seems certain. So it is imperative ...

Appellate Division, First Department, People V. Celaj, Danielle Dupré

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Court Of Appeals Of New York, People V. Johnson, Denise Shanley

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

False Arrest, Malicious Prosecution, And Abuse Of Process In § 1983 Litigation, John Williams

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Critique Of The Second Circuit’S Analysis In Nicholas V. Goord, John Dorsett Niles

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The Case Note proceeds as follows. Part I traces the historical and procedural facts underlying Nicholas. Part II describes the legal backdrop against which the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided the case. Part III steps through the Second Circuit’s majority opinion, and Part IV critiques the opinion. Part V concludes the Case Note by discussing the ramifications of Nicholas for future DNA-indexing cases.

Qualified Immunity In The Fourth Amendment: A Practical Application Of 1983 As It Applies To Fourth Amendment Excessive Force Cases, Karen Blum

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Section 1983 Cases In The October 2004 Term, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.