Law Commons^™

Persistent Surveillance, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Persistent surveillance technologies grant police vast new investigative capabilities. The technologies both monitor targeted areas and generate databases of searchable information about people, places, and patterns that can be connected and accessed for criminal prosecutions.

In the face of this growing police surveillance, courts have struggled to make sense of a fragmented Fourth Amendment doctrine. The Supreme Court has offered some clues that “digital may be different” when it comes to surveillance, but lower courts have been left struggling to apply old law to new technologies. Warrantless use of persistent surveillance technologies raises hard questions about when a “search” occurs …

Big Data Prosecution And Brady, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Prosecutors are joining the big data revolution, adopting “intelligence-driven” strategies to target crime patterns. Centralized big data systems now track offenders, places, and groups allowing prosecutors to link crimes by time, place, associations, or other connections. Adding to these types of formalized, structured databases are growing sources of raw, unstructured big data from digital surveillance technologies like video cameras, police body cameras, and automated license plate readers. The prosecutors of the future will sit on a wealth of valuable investigative insights – all searchable and potentially relevant for a more aggressive and proactive investigation strategy.But as helpful as these new …

The 'Smart' Fourth Amendment, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

“Smart” devices radiate data, detailing a continuous, intimate, and revealing pattern of daily life. Billions of sensors will soon collect data from smartphones, smart homes, smart cars, medical devices and an evolving assortment of consumer and commercial products. But, what are these data trails to the Fourth Amendment? Does data emanating from devices on or about our bodies, houses, things, and digital effects fall within the Fourth Amendment’s protection of “persons, homes, papers, or effects”? Does interception of this information violate a “reasonable expectation of privacy?”The “Internet of Things” and the growing proliferation of smart devices create new opportunities for …

Keep Your Eyes On Eyes In The Sky, Hillary B. Farber

Faculty Publications

To date, eight states have passed bills regulating domestic drone use by government and private individuals. This leaves us with a question: If a city of more than 60,000 residents and a global company with a customer base in the hundreds of millions are racing to the sky, how are we as a commonwealth of 6.6 million to truly launch ourselves into the debate and protect what little privacy we have left?

Big Data Distortions: Exploring The Limits Of The Aba Leatpr Standards, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article examines the American Bar Associations’ Standards for Criminal Justice proposed Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records (LEATPR). The article was written to be part of an Oklahoma Law Review Symposium on the subject of the LEATPR Standards. The article explores how the ABA LEATPR Standards can survive the impact of big data policing. Big data policing, as described here, involves utilizing vast, networked databases to investigate and also predict criminal activity. Big data policing involves the use of not just third party, but "fourth party" commercial aggregators as well as de-identified data sets, that eventually can be …

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 …

A Fourth Amendment Theory For Arrestee Dna And Other Biometric Databases, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Routine DNA sampling following a custodial arrest process is now the norm in many jurisdictions, but is it consistent with the Fourth Amendment? The few courts that have addressed the question have disagreed on the answer, but all of them seem to agree on two points: (1) the reasonableness of the practice turns on a direct form of balancing of individual and governmental interests; and (2) individuals who are convicted — and even those who are merely arrested — have a greatly diminished expectation of privacy in their identities. This Article disputes these propositions and offers an improved framework for …

Dna Database Trawls And The Definition Of A Search In Boroian V. Mueller, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

As a general matter, once the government acquires information from a permissible search or seizure, it can use this information in later criminal investigations. Courts have applied this simple rule to uphold the indefinite reuse of DNA samples acquired from convicted offenders. This essay describes the First Circuit Court of Appeals’ reliance on the rule in rejecting a convicted offender’s claim that his DNA sample and profile had to be removed from the federal DNA databank after he completed his sentence. Acknowledging that the rule permitting reuse should not be applied mechanically, I argue that the rule's application to DNA …