Law Commons^™

Transaction Surveillance By The Government, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium article is the second of two on regulation of government efforts to obtain recorded information for criminal prosecutions. More specifically, it explores the scope and regulation of "transaction surveillance," which it defines as government attempts to access already existing records, either physically or through data banks, and government efforts to obtain, in real-time or otherwise, "catalogic data" (the identifying signals of a transaction, such as the address of an email recipient). Transaction surveillance is a potent way of discovering and making inferences about a person's activities, character and identity. Yet, despite a bewildering array of statutorily created authorization …