Privacy Law Commons^™

Cause To Believe What? The Importance Of Defining A Search's Object--Or, How The Aba Would Analyze The Nsa Metadata Surveillance Program, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Courts and scholars have devoted considerable attention to the definition of probable cause and reasonable suspicion. Since the demise of the mere evidence rule in the 1960s, however, they have rarely examined how these central Fourth Amendment concepts interact with the object of the search. That is unfortunate, because this interaction can have significant consequences. For instance, probable cause to believe that a search might lead to evidence of wrongdoing triggers a very different inquiry than probable cause to believe that a search will produce evidence of criminal activity. The failure to address the constraints that should be imposed on …

A Cloudy Forecast: Divergence In The Cloud Computing Laws Of The United States, European Union, And China, Tina Cheng

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Rapid Rise Of Delayed Notice Searches, And The Fourth Amendment “Rule Requiring Notice”, Jonathan Witmer-Rich

Pepperdine Law Review

This article documents the rapid rise of covert searching, through delayed notice search warrants, and argues that covert searching in its current form presumptively violates the Fourth Amendment’s “rule requiring notice.” Congress authorized these “sneak and peek” warrants in the USA Patriot Act, in 2001, and soon after added a reporting requirement to monitor this invasive search technique. Since 2001, the use of delayed notice search warrants has risen dramatically, from around 25 in 2002 to 5,601 in 2012, suggesting that “sneak and peek” searches are becoming alarmingly common. In fact, it is not at all clear whether true “sneak …

Yale Symposium: Unpacking Nsa's Global Problem, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Privacy In Social Media: To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?, Tara M. Breslawski

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Post-Tsa Airport: A Constitution Free Zone?, Daniel S. Harawa

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Facebook Is Not Your Friend: Protecting A Private Employee's Expectation Of Privacy In Social Networking Content In The Twenty-First Century Workplace, Cara Magatelli

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This Comment explores the implications SNS postings have on private employers concerning the off-duty, non-work related conduct of their employees. This argument recognizes that an employee is entitled to engage in whatever legal off-duty conduct he chooses, so long as the behavior does not damage his employer's legitimate business interests. An employer should not be able to use information gleaned from an employee's SNS postings, unrelated to an employer's business interests, to punish an employee for her choices outside the work place. Disciplining or terminating an employee for his off-duty lifestyle choices permits the morals and standards of the employer …

When Enough Is Enough: Location Tracking, Mosaic Theory, And Machine Learning, Steven M. Bellovin, Renée M. Hutchins, Tony Jebara, Sebastian Zimmeck

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1967, when it decided Katz v. United States, the Supreme Court has tied the right to be free of unwanted government scrutiny to the concept of reasonable xpectations of privacy.^[1] An evaluation of reasonable expectations depends, among other factors, upon an assessment of the intrusiveness of government action. When making such assessment historically the Court has considered police conduct with clear temporal, geographic, or substantive limits. However, in an era where new technologies permit the storage and compilation of vast amounts of personal data, things are becoming more complicated. A school of thought known as “mosaic theory” …

The Child Independence Is Born: James Otis And Writs Of Assistance, James M. Farrell

Communication

This chapter is a reexamination of the Writs of Assistance speech by James Otis. In particular, it is a reconsideration of the evidence upon which rests the historical reputation of Otis’s address. Are the claims by historians who credit Otis with sparking the Revolutionary movement in colonial America warranted or not? That reassessment begins with a detailed review of the nature and function of writs of assistance within the political, legal, and economic environment of colonial Massachusetts. It then turns to an analysis of the legal dispute over writs of assistance in the 1761 trial. From there we will reconstruct …

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 (2014), Timothy Geverd

UIC 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 …

Anonymity, Faceprints, And The Constitution, Kimberly L. Wehle

All Faculty Scholarship

Part I defines anonymity and explains that respect for the capacity to remain physically and psychologically unknown to the government traces back to the Founding. With the advent and expansion of new technologies such as facial recognition technology (“FRT”), the ability to remain anonymous has eroded, leading to a litany of possible harms.

Part II reviews the existing Fourth and First Amendment doctrine that is available to stave off ubiquitous government surveillance and identifies anonymity as a constitutional value that warrants more explicit doctrinal protection. Although the Fourth Amendment has been construed to excise surveillance of public and third-party information …

Maryland's Social Networking Law: No "Friend" To Employers And Employees, Alexander Borman

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Reforming The Grand Jury To Protect Privacy In Third Party Records, Andrew Taslitz, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

In late 2014, two grand juries returned controversial no bill decisions in police killings, one in Ferguson, Missouri, and one in New York City. These outcomes have renewed calls for grand jury reform, and whatever one thinks of these particular processes and outcomes, such reform is long overdue. One logical source of reform to better respect privacy in records, which would have incidental benefits beyond this privacy focus, would be the newly enacted American Bar Association Standards for Criminal Justice on Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records (LEATPR).

But LEATPR exempts from its requirements access to records via a …

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

Faculty Articles

"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 …

The Right To Digital Privacy: Advancing The Jeffersonian Vision Of Adaptive Change, Kerry Moller

CMC Senior Theses

The relationship between privacy, technology, and law is complex. Thomas Jefferson’s prescient nineteenth century observation that laws and institutions must keep pace with the times offers a vision for change. Statutory law and court precedents help to define our right to privacy, however, the development of new technologies has complicated the application of old precedents and statutes. Third party organizations, such as Google, facilitate new methods of communication, and the government can often collect the information that third parties receive with a subpoena or court order, rather than a Fourth Amendment-mandated warrant. Privacy promotes fundamental democratic freedoms, however, under current …

Light In The Darkness: How The Leatpr Standards Guide Legislators In Regulating Law Enforcement Access To Cell Site Location Records, Susan Freiwald

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Aba Standards For Criminal Justice: Law Enforcement Access To Third Party Records: Critical Perspectives From A Technology-Centered Approach To Quantitative Privacy, David C. Gray

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ubiquitous Privacy, Thomas P. Crocker

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privacy In Public, Joel R. Reidenberg

Faculty Scholarship

As government and private companies rapidly expand the infrastructure of surveillance from cameras on every street corner to facial recognition for photographs on social media sites, privacy doctrines built on seclusion are at odds with technological advances. This essay addresses a key conceptual problem in US privacy law identified by Justice Sotomayor in U.S. v. Jones and by Justice Scalia in Kyllo v. U.S.; namely that technological capabilities undermine the meaning of the third-party doctrine and the 4th Amendment's ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ standard. The essay argues that the conceptual problem derives from the evolution of three stages of development …

Failing Expectations: Fourth Amendment Doctrine In The Era Of Total Surveillance, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Today’s reasonable expectation test and the third-party doctrine have little to nothing to offer by way of privacy protection if users today are at least conflicted about whether transactional noncontent data should be shared with third parties, including law enforcement officials. This uncertainty about how to define public expectation as a descriptive matter has compelled courts to defer to legislatures to find out what public expectation ought to be more as a matter of prudence than doctrine. Courts and others presume that legislatures are far better than courts at defining public expectations about emergent technologies.This Essay argues that the reasonable …

The Court Loses Its Way With The Global Positioning System: United States V. Jones Retreats To The “Classic Trespassory Search”, George M. Dery Iii, Ryan Evaro

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article analyzes United States v. Jones, in which the Supreme Court considered whether government placement of a global positioning system (GPS) device on a vehicle to follow a person’s movements constituted a Fourth Amendment “search.” The Jones Court ruled that two distinct definitions existed for a Fourth Amendment “search.” In addition to Katz v. United States’s reasonable-expectation-of-privacy standard, which the Court had used exclusively for over four decades, the Court recognized a second kind of search that it called a “classic trespassory search.” The second kind of search occurs when officials physically trespass or intrude upon a constitutionally protected …

The Right To Quantitative Privacy, David Gray, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

We are at the cusp of a historic shift in our conceptions of the Fourth Amendment driven by dramatic advances in surveillance technology. Governments and their private sector agents continue to invest billions of dollars in massive data-mining projects, advanced analytics, fusion centers, and aerial drones, all without serious consideration of the constitutional issues that these technologies raise. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court signaled an end to its silent acquiescence in this expanding surveillance state. In that case, five justices signed concurring opinions defending a revolutionary proposition: that citizens have Fourth Amendment interests in substantial quantities of …

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

Other Faculty Publications

An invited essay for Constitution Day, also available here: http://blogs.law.widener.edu/constitution2013/2013-essay-authors/stephen-henderson/It addresses the national security surveillance disclosed by Edward Snowden and others, and asks whether a fundamental shift would be prudent in the era of Big Data.

It’S Raining Katz And Jones: The Implications Of United States V. Jones–A Case Of Sound And Fury, Jace C. Gatewood

Pace Law Review

This Article discusses the implications of Jones in light of emerging technology capable of duplicating the monitoring undertaken in Jones with the same degree of intrusiveness attributable to GPS tracking devices, but without depending on any physical invasion of property. This Article also discusses how the pervasive use of this emerging technology may reshape reasonable expectations of privacy concerning an individual’s public movements, making it all the more difficult to apply the Fourth Amendment constitutional tests outlined in Jones. In this regard, this Article explores recent trends in electronic tracking, surveillance, and other investigative methods that have raised privacy concerns, …

Survey Of Washington Search And Seizure Law: 2013 Update, Justice Charles W. Johnson, Justice Debra L. Stephens

Seattle University Law Review

This survey is intended to serve as a resource to which Washington lawyers, judges, law enforcement officers, and others can turn as an authoritative starting point for researching Washington search and seizure law. In order to be useful as a research tool, this Survey requires periodic updates to address new cases interpreting the Washington constitution and the U.S. Constitution and to reflect the current state of the law. Many of these cases involve the Washington State Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Washington constitution. Also, as the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to examine Fourth Amendment search and seizure jurisprudence, its …

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David Gray, Danielle K. 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 explores …

The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin Murphy

Michigan Law Review

When criminal justice scholars think of privacy, they think of the Fourth Amendment. But lately its domain has become far less absolute. The United States Code currently contains over twenty separate statutes that restrict both the acquisition and release of covered information. Largely enacted in the latter part of the twentieth century, these statutes address matters vital to modern existence. They control police access to driver's licenses, educational records, health histories, telephone calls, email messages, and even video rentals. They conform to no common template, but rather enlist a variety of procedural tools to serve as safeguards - ranging from …

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 Right To Quantitative Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

We are at the cusp of a historic shift in our conceptions of the Fourth Amendment driven by dramatic advances in surveillance technology. Governments and their private sector agents continue to invest billions of dollars in massive data-mining projects, advanced analytics, fusion centers, and aerial drones, all without serious consideration of the constitutional issues that these technologies raise. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court signaled an end to its silent acquiescence in this expanding surveillance state. In that case, five justices signed concurring opinions defending a revolutionary proposition: that citizens have Fourth Amendment interests in substantial quantities of …

Warrantless Government Drone Surveillance: A Challenge To The Fourth Amendment, 30 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 155 (2013), Jennifer O'Brien

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

The Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 aims to integrate drones into the United States national airspace by 2015. While the thought of prevalent private and public daily drone use might seem implausible now, the combination of this new legislation and the increasing availability of inexpensive, technologically advanced small drones will make it a reality. From detectaphones to pen registers and most recently, the GPS, the Supreme Court has faced a plethora of unreasonable search challenges to the warrantless use of such sense augmentation devices by law enforcement to collect information. Acting as the privacy safeguard of …