Computers, Privacy & the Constitution

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In writing for the Web, what's the point of making footnotes? These should be links in the text. Make things easy for the reader.


Substantively, this draft depends on the idea that when two radios are in touch with one another, the fact of the connection "belongs" to the smaller radio, and the owner of the larger radio should for some reason not be able to use that information for its own purposes, and should not be subject to legal requests for it.

Somehow, then, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to cover a subject which it had no prior connection with, because we need privacy and we can't believe that we lost it without doing something about it. I'm sympathetic, but I did spend weeks trying to explain in detail why this won't work and the history can't be assumed away. Now, without making any reference to what I said on the subject, you've simply asserted that because we need the location of the other fellow's radio that we put ourselves in touch with to be private, it is private, and not only private, but the government should need a search warrant, not a subpoena, to get it.

But this makes no sense. If you want the cellular service provider not to know where you are, your phone has to be off, or you have to leave it somewhere else. The US Constitution doesn't dictate that you rather than the service provider have a right to data generated by the fact that your two radios were in touch, let alone that these radio signals are so sacred that government needs a search warrant for the fact of the connections. If you're going to make that argument, it has to be based on more than assertion of need: there has to be some relationship between the legal doctrine for which you are contending and the prior history of the constitutional provision. Otherwise, you are just making up constitutional law.

 1. Mobile Technology Fact Sheet, PEW RES. CENTER, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/ (last visited Mar. 4, 2017)

2. Riley v. California, _ U.S. _, 134 S. Ct. 2473, 2484 (2014).


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Revision 5r5 - 12 Apr 2017 - 04:52:42 - EveShabto
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