Law Commons^™

Joining Forces To Combat Crime In The Maritime Domain: Cooperative Maritime Surveillance And Enforcement In The South Pacific Region, Robin M. Warner

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

The South Pacific as a region has far more ocean space than land territory. The majority of small island States in the South Pacific are heavily dependent on the sea for their resources and livelihoods. While militaries in our region have recently been focussed on resolving the civil disorder generated by political unrest on land, in locations such as Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Fiji, navies have also had prevalent maritime law enforcement roles in the region, both advisory and operational, for several decades. Threats to the security of the region from crime in the maritime domain will continue to arise …

The Protect America Act Of 2007: A Framework For Improving Intelligence Collection In The War On Terror, Jeffrey F. Addicott, Michael T. Mccaul

Faculty Articles

The most important weapon in the War on Terror is intelligence. The Protect America Act of 2007, a modification of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was favored by Congress for providing a positive framework for ensuring the proper rule of law kept pace with changes in technology. FISA closed the intelligence gaps that had arisen because of the application of the Act to foreign persons in foreign countries.

FISA codifies in federal law the procedures associated with how electronic surveillance and searches of acquisition of foreign intelligence is conducted. In order to conduct electronic surveillance, a court order must …

Data Mining And The Security-Liberty Debate, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this essay, written for a symposium on surveillance for the University of Chicago Law Review, I examine some common difficulties in the way that liberty is balanced against security in the context of data mining. Countless discussions about the trade-offs between security and liberty begin by taking a security proposal and then weighing it against what it would cost our civil liberties. Often, the liberty interests are cast as individual rights and balanced against the security interests, which are cast in terms of the safety of society as a whole. Courts and commentators defer to the government's assertions about …

The Memory Gap In Surveillance Law, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

U.S. information privacy laws contain a memory gap: they regulate the collection and disclosure of certain kinds of information, but they say little about its retention. This memory gap has ever-increasing significance for the structure of government surveillance law. Under current doctrine, the Fourth Amendment generally requires government agents to meet high standards before directly and prospectively gathering a target's communications. The law takes a dramatically different approach to indirect, surveillance-like activities, such as the compelled production of communications from a third party, even when those activities yield the same information as, or more information than, direct surveillance activities. Because …

Fourth Amendment Protection For Stored E-Mail, Patricia L. Bellia, Susan Freiwald

Journal Articles

The question of whether and how the Fourth Amendment regulates government access to stored e-mail remains open and pressing. A panel of the Sixth Circuit recently held in Warshak v. United States, 490 F.3d 455 (6th Cir. 2007), that users generally retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the e-mails they store with their Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which implies that government agents must generally acquire a warrant before they may compel ISPs to disclose their users' stored e-mails. The Sixth Circuit, however, is reconsidering the case en banc. This Article examines the nature of stored e-mail surveillance and argues …

Dredging Up The Past: Lifelogging, Memory And Surveillance, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

The term “lifelog” refers to a comprehensive archive of an individual's quotidian existence, created with the help of pervasive computing technologies. Lifelog technologies would record and store everyday conversations, actions, and experiences of their users, enabling future replay and aiding remembrance. Products to assist lifelogging are already on the market; but the technology that will enable people fully and continuously to document their entire lives is still in the research and development phase. For generals, edgy artists and sentimental grandmothers alike, lifelogging could someday replace or complement, existing memory preservation practices. Like a traditional diary, journal or day-book, the lifelog …

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 …

Understanding Privacy (Chapter One), Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Privacy is one of the most important concepts of our time, yet it is also one of the most elusive. As rapidly changing technology makes information increasingly available, scholars, activists, and policymakers have struggled to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible.

In UNDERSTANDING PRIVACY (Harvard University Press, May 2008), Professor Daniel J. Solove offers a comprehensive overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy and ultimately provides a provocative resolution. He argues that no single definition can be workable, but rather that there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by family …

Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, And Exposure, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay considers the relationship between privacy and visibility in the networked information age. Visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy, but a persistent tendency to conceptualize privacy harms and expectations in terms of visibility has created two problems. First, focusing on visibility diminishes the salience and obscures the operation of nonvisual mechanisms designed to render individual identity, behavior, and preferences transparent to third parties. The metaphoric mapping to visibility suggests that surveillance is simply passive observation, rather than the active production of categories, narratives, and, norms. Second, even a broader conception of privacy harms as a function …

Warrantless Location Tracking, Ian Samuel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The ubiquity of cell phones has transformed police investigations. Tracking a suspect's movements by following her phone is now a common but largely unnoticed surveillance technique. It is useful, no doubt, precisely because it is so revealing; it also raises significant privacy concerns. In this Note, I consider what the procedural requirements for cell phone tracking should be by examining the relevant statutory and constitutional law. Ultimately, the best standard is probable cause; only an ordinary warrant can satisfy the text of the statutes and the mandates of the Constitution.