Privacy Law Commons^™

The Fourth Amendment In The Information Age, Ricardo J. Bascuas

Articles

In 2013, the Supreme Court tacitly conceded that the expectations-of-privacy test used since 1967 to assess claims of Fourth Amendment violations was inadequate. It asserted that the previous property-based test for Fourth Amendment violations had never despite widespread agreement to the contrary been overruled. The Court compounded its artfulness by applying a new, significantly weaker trespass test that, like the expectations-of-privacy test, enjoys no legal pedigree. This new trespass test, which is to be applied together with the expectations-of-privacy test, suffers from the same defect as the test it purportedly supplements. It does not require the government to respect private …

Clever Contraband: Why Illinois’ Lockstep With The U.S. Supreme Court Gives Police Authority To Search The Bowels Of Your Vehicle, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 425 (2013), Jason Cooper

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Post-Jones: How District Courts Are Answering The Myriad Questions Raised By The Supreme Court's Decision In United States V. Jones, Jason D. Medinger

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Evolving Fourth Amendment: United States V. Jones, The Information Cloud, And The Right To Exclude, Ber-An Pan

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards On Law Enforcement Access To Third Party Records, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Drafted over the past six years and adopted by the American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates in February, 2012, these Criminal Justice Standards on Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records provide much needed guidance to legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies having to decide how to regulate law enforcement access to existing records in the hands of third parties. It is the first framework of its kind, and it can do much to improve the current system of ad hoc protections in both state and federal systems. Decision makers are struggling to determine when to permit law enforcement access …

After United States V. Jones, After The Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the proposition that the Government can surreptitiously electronically track vehicle location for an entire month without Fourth Amendment restraint. While the Court's three opinions leave much uncertain, in one perspective they fit nicely within a long string of cases in which the Court is cautiously developing new standards of Fourth Amendment protection, including a rejection of a strong third party doctrine. This Article develops that perspective and provides a cautiously optimistic view of where search and seizure protections may be headed.

More detail:

United States v. Jones, in which the …

Genetic Privacy & The Fourth Amendment: Unregulated Surreptitious Dna Harvesting, Albert E. Scherr

Georgia Law Review

Genetic privacy and police practices have come to the
fore in the criminal justice system. Case law and stories
in the media document that police are surreptitiously
harvesting the out-of-body DNA of putative suspects.
Some sources even indicate that surreptitious data
banking may also be in its infancy. Surreptitious
harvesting of out-of-body DNA by the police is currently
unregulated by the Fourth Amendment. The few courts
that have addressed the issue find that the police are free
to harvest DNA abandoned by a putative suspect in a
public place. Little in the nascent surreptitious harvesting
case law suggests that surreptitious …

Can't Escape From The Memory: Social Media And Public Sector Labor Law, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

The Web 2.0 communicative revolution is impacting many fields of law, including labor and employment law. This article focuses upon the application and impact of statutory and constitutional doctrines on the use of social media in public employment in the United States. As part of that analysis, it will compare and contrast developments under the National Labor Relations Act, state collective bargaining and tenure laws and the First Amendment concerning social media. Through this comparative analysis, the article will highlight the distinctions and similarities of public sector labor law and their implications for the future.

Back To The Future: United States V Jones Resuscitates Property Law Concepts In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Nancy Forster

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preserving Privacy In A Digital Age: Lessons Of Comparative Constitutionalism, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the modern age, we increasingly live our lives through, and accompanied by, digital media. Virtually every transaction or communication that uses such media, as well as every move of mobile phone owners, is recorded. Computers are able to store, transmit, and analyze the data as never before, drawing on multiple sources to construct an intimate picture of our interests, contacts, travels and desires. Private data-mining services, most often used for commercial advertising purposes, can determine: what we read, listen to, and look at; where we travel to, shop, and dine; and with whom we speak or associate. Meanwhile, social …

What Alex Kozinski And The Investigation Of Earl Bradley Teach About Searching And Seizing Computers And The Dangers Of Inevitable Discovery, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This paper tells two stories. One concerns the investigation of a Delaware physician named Earl B. Bradley that resulted in a conviction and sentence of fourteen consecutive life terms for the sexual abuse of children. The other concerns the computer problems, both judicial and extra-judicial, of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Though in a sense unrelated, they share lessons about the practicalities of computers and their search that are worth telling. As courts continue to struggle with how to cabin the searches of computers in order to minimize privacy intrusion …

Search, Seizure, And Immunity: Second-Order Normative Authority And Rights, Stephen E. Henderson, Kelly Sorensen

Faculty Articles

A paradigmatic aspect of a paradigmatic kind of right is that the rights holder is the only one who can alienate it. When individuals waive rights, the normative source of that waiving is normally taken to be the individual herself. This moral feature—immunity—is usually in the background of discussions about rights. We bring it into the foreground here, with specific attention to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kentucky v. King (2011), concerning search and seizure rights. An entailment of the Court’s decision is that, at least in some cases, a right can be removed by the intentional actions of …

Real-Time And Historic Location Surveillance After United States V. Jones: An Administrable, Mildly Mosaic Approach, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

In United States v. Jones, the government took an extreme position: so far as the federal Constitution is concerned, law enforcement can surreptitiously electronically track the movements of any American over the course of an entire month without cause or restraint. According to the government, whether the surveillance be for good reason, invidious reason, or no reason, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated. Fortunately, that position was unanimously rejected by the High Court. The Court did not, however, resolve what restriction or restraint the Fourth Amendment places upon location surveillance, reflecting a proper judicial restraint in this nuanced and difficult …

Durkheim's Internet: Social And Political Theory In Online Society, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

While the Internet has changed dramatically since the early 1990s, the legal regime governing the right to privacy online and Internet speech is still steeped in a myth of the Internet user, completely hidden from others, in total control of his online experience, and free to come and go as he pleases. This false image of the “virtual self” has also contributed to an ethos of lawlessness, irresponsibility, and radical individuation online, allowing the evisceration of online privacy and the proliferation of hate and harassment.

I argue that the myth of the online anonym is not only false as a …

Biometric Id Cybersurveillance, Margaret Hu

Faculty Scholarship

The implementation of a universal digitalized biometric ID system risks normalizing and integrating mass cybersurveillance into the daily lives of ordinary citizens. ID documents such as driver’s licenses in some states and all U.S. passports are now implanted with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. In recent proposals, Congress has considered implementing a digitalized biometric identification card—such as a biometric-based, “high-tech” Social Security Card—which may eventually lead to the development of a universal multimodal biometric database (e.g., the collection of the digital photos, fingerprints, iris scans, and/or DNA of all citizens and noncitizens). Such “hightech” IDs, once merged with GPS-RFID tracking …

Fighting Cybercrime After United States V. Jones, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron, Liz Clark Rinehart

Faculty Scholarship

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus …

The Fight To Frame Privacy, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The resolution of a debate often hinges on how the problem being debated is presented. In psychology and related disciplines, this method of issue presentation is known as framing. Framing theory holds that even small changes in the presentation of an issue or event can produce significant changes of opinion. Framing has become increasingly important in discussions about privacy and security. In his new book, "Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security," Daniel Solove argues that if we continue to view privacy and security as diametrically opposed to each other, privacy will always lose. Solove argues that …

Rehnquist And Panvasive Searches, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the history of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist may have been the least friendly justice toward the view that the Fourth Amendment should be read expansively. Even he, however, might have interpreted the amendment to place more restrictions on modern law enforcement techniques than current caselaw does. Relying on a 1974 article authored by Rehnquist, this essay, written for a symposium on Rehnquist and the Fourth Amendment, describes his views on the types of requirements the Fourth Amendment imposes on the police, how decriminalization can protect privacy, and most importantly, why Rehnquist might have been willing to regulate surveillance …

Looking Through The Prism Of Privacy And Trespass: Smartphones And The Fourth Amendment, Saby Ghoshray

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Technology in the twenty-first century has dramatically changed our lives, but the law has not kept pace with technological advances. The treatment of smartphones in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is no exception. This is made evident by the increasingly scattered outcomes of litigation involving the privacy interests of smartphone owners.' As the cross-jurisdictional inconsistencies of judicial decisions applying the Fourth Amendment to smartphones mount, I am drawn to seek answers from two foundational pillars of the Supreme Court's search and seizure jurisprudence: protection against invasions of privacy and the bulwark against trespass.

Warrantless Searches And Smartphones: Privacy In The Palm Of Your Hand?, Margaret M. Lawton

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Incident to a drug arrest, a police officer removes a smartphone from the pocket of the defendant. The smartphone may have incriminating evidence-phone numbers, pictures, text messages, and e-mails. But can the officer examine the smartphone on the scene or back at the station? Or does the officer need to show probable cause and obtain a warrant before examining the phone? If the phone were instead the arrestee's wallet or a cigarette package, under the search incident to lawful arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement the officer could open and search inside either of these "containers." Anything found …

Public Education And Student Privacy: Application Of The Fourth Amendment To Dormitories At Public Colleges And Universities, Bryan R. Lemons

Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Wiretapping The Internet: The Expansion Of The Communications Assistance To Law Enforcement Act To Extend Government Surveillance, Christa M. Hibbard

Federal Communications Law Journal

Criminal use of the Internet to circumvent traditional government phone wiretaps has inspired the Obama Administration to create a proposal to expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act ("CALEA"). CALEA was passed in 1994 to regulate telephone and broadband companies to ensure compliance with standards to enable government wiretapping. The proposed amendment of CALEA would allow the government to require all communications service providers to meet technical standards necessary to comply with a wiretap order. The expansion of CALEA would likely widen its scope to social networking sites, instant messaging, gaming consoles that allow conversation among multiple players, and …

Indecent Exposure: Do Warrantless Searches Of Cell Phones Violate The Fourth Amendment?, Amy Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that searches of student’s cell phone should require a warrant in most circumstances. The amount and personal nature of information on a smart phone warrants special Fourth Amendment protection. This issue is particularly relevant in the public school setting where administrators routinely confiscate phones from students caught using them in school. With more frequency, administrators are looking at the phones, scrolling through text messages and photos, and on some occasions, responding to text messages.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Safford v. Redding, acknowledges the special considerations that school children should be afforded in part because of the …

Expectations Of Privacy In Social Media, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This article, which largely tracks my remarks at Mississippi College’s Social Media Symposium, examines expectations of privacy in social media such as weblogs (blogs), Facebook pages, and Twitter tweets. Social media is diverse and ever-diversifying, and while I address some of that complexity, I focus on the core functionality, which provides the groundwork for further conversation as the technology and related social norms develop. As one would expect, just as with our offline communications and other online communications, in some we have an expectation of privacy that is recognized by current law, in some we have an expectation of privacy …

Bringing Clarity To Administrative Search Doctrine: Distinguishing Dragnets From Special Subpopulation Searches, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Anyone who has been stopped at a sobriety checkpoint, screened at an international border, scanned by a metal detector at an airport or government building, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search or seizure. Searches of public school students, government employees, and probationers are characterized as administrative, as are business inspections and-increasingly-wiretaps and other searches used in the gathering of national security intelligence. In other words, the government conducts thousands of administrative searches every day. None of these searches requires either probable cause or a search warrant. Instead, courts evaluating administrative searches need only …

Virtual Blinds: Finding Online Privacy In Offline Precedents, Allyson W. Haynes

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

A person in a building shows a desire for privacy by pulling her blinds shut or closing her curtains. Otherwise, she cannot complain when her neighbor sees her undressing from the window, or when a policeman looks up from the street and sees her marijuana plants. In the online context, can we find an analogy to these privacy blinds? Or is the window legally bare because of the nature of the Internet?

This Article argues that by analyzing the privacy given to communications in the offline context, and in particular, by analyzing case law recognizing privacy in an otherwise public …

Big Brother Is Watching: The Reality Show You Didn't Audition For, J. Amy Dillard

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1984, at the height of the Reagan-era war on drugs, the Supreme Court created a bright-line exception to Fourth Amendment protection by declaring that no person had a reasonable expectation of privacy in an area defined as an open field. When it created the exception, the Court ignored positive law and its own jurisprudence that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. The open fields doctrine allows law enforcement officers to enter posted, private areas that are not part of a house or its curtilage for brief surveillance. The Supreme Court has never “extended the open fields doctrine to …

Pledge Your Body For Your Bread: Welfare, Drug Testing, And The Inferior Fourth Amendment, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

Proposals to subject welfare recipients to periodic drug testing have emerged over the last three years as a significant legislative trend across the United States. Since 2007, over half of the states have considered bills requiring aid recipients to submit to invasive extraction procedures as an ongoing condition of public assistance. The vast majority of the legislation imposes testing without regard to suspected drug use, reflecting the implicit assumption that the poor are inherently predisposed to culpable conduct and thus may be subject to class-based intrusions that would be inarguably impermissible if inflicted on the less destitute. These proposals are …

Schools: Where Fewer Rights Are Reasonable? Why The Reasonableness Standard Is Inappropriate To Measure The Use Of Rfid Tracking Devices On Students, 28 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 411 (2011), Alexandra C. Hirsch

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

In an unsuccessful attempt to heighten security, schools are implementing a technology that offers access to children’s personal information and minute-by-minute location. Although not entirely new, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology use has recently been expanding within the school arena. Skeptics knowledgeable about the downfalls of the technology, however, have reason to be concerned. In order to understand the true urgency of this issue, this comment will explain the background of RFID technology, specifically what RFID tags are, how they are used, their purposes, and how they have become unsafe. Included will be an explanation of the reasons that schools …

Following You Here, There, And Everywhere; An Investigation Of Gps Technology, Privacy, And The Fourth Amendment, 45 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1 (2011), Stephanie G. Forbes

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.