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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Introduction | |
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< | The evolution of technology has complicated the interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Modern interpretations tend to focus on the portion of the Amendment prohibiting "unreasonable searches and seizures." Crucial as this fragment might be, it must be read in light of the surrounding language. In particular, the concepts of "search" and "seizure" do not exist in a conceptual vacuum. Rather, they are defined with respect to particular physical settings: the people have a right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects." This language indicates that the ratifiers were concerned mainly with government intrusion into well-defined private spaces. Given the eighteenth-century backdrop against which the Amendment was drafted, these limitations are not surprising. At that time, "searches" could only be conducted by physical intrusion into a house or the physical detainment of a person. Likewise, "seizures" necessarily referred to the taking of physical objects or papers bearing information. In this historical context, "surveillance"--as that term is presently understood--simply did not exist. In effect, carrying out an act of search and seizure was an all-or-nothing proposition: either the government refrained from attempting to obtain private information, or the government employed physical methods of search and seizure that implicated the plain language of the Fourth Amendment.
Modern technology, however, has blurred the distinction between that which is "private" for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment and that which is "public." Given that a significant portion--if not the majority--of communications are now transmitted by electronic means, it is no longer necessary to detain "persons" or invade "houses" in order to secure "papers" and "effects."
Section I
Subsection A
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”) and the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”). There are, of course, major problems with the issue. We are sending copies everywhere to people who don’t have their shit together! There is a danger, however, subpoena
What is the major danger of widespread, unsupervised cooperation between service providers, like Google and Facebook, and the government? There are two major branches to this question. First is what Professor Philip Bobbitt has called the “strategic” dimension. The government has routinely carried out surveillance on foreign nationals. After the Patriot Act, its ability to surveil American citizens has also dramatically broadened. Now, the government is not yet prepared to take some form of preemptive action against perceived “threats” from its won citizens. A plausible form of intimidation may be the use of information gleaned from social networks to fabricate some kind of reasonable suspicion for a search, or probable cause for an arrest, thereby subjecting citizens to harassment based on information they make available on social networks. A safeguard against this may be to amend the Electronic Privacy Communications Act to prohibit such “bootstrapping,” so that no information gleaned from web-crawling of social networks may be a basis for reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
To a large extent, however, focusing on the retrospective effects of criminal law obscures the more important issue, which is potential transfer of information from Facebook to the national security apparatus. While it is almost certain that national security apparatuses would take interest in the contents of Facebook, there appears to be no transparency concerning how Facebook interacts with national security agencies.
A related problem, however, may be the reporting of non-public postings by Facebook friends.
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Section II
Subsection A
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> | The American government has an unprecedented capacity to surveil its own citizens, yet the existence of such capabilities has not generated much commentary by the public. Although the occasional op-ed piece might express concern about the extent to which blanket surveillance has become a reality, the voices of caution are invariably lost in a chorus of complacency. Without doubt, much of the complacency is due to reluctance to think about the problem. Why concern oneself with what the government might be monitoring when one can carry on with business as usual? Isn’t it a bit kooky to worry about what goes on inside the NSA when whatever happens there has no perceived effect on civil liberties? While such complacency is an obstacle in its own right, it would be a mistake to think that the apathy toward government surveillance can be dispelled by attacking complacency alone. Raising the public’s consciousness will require more because complacency is merely the symptom of a deeper failure to understand the ways in which widespread surveillance impinges on the traditional conception of ordered liberty. Only by showing to the public the concrete ways in which surveillance enables the abuse of power will one be able to begin a sensible discussion of how such surveillance should be controlled.
The first obstacle encountered by the would-be raiser of consciousness is the public’s apparently limitless faith in the constitutional guarantee of due process. “But we have due process!” has become the common refrain of those voices in the chorus of complacency. Due process, of course, should be afforded all due credit for its protection of civil liberties, but the scope of its protection should not be overstated. Modern surveillance practices are dangerous precisely because they enable the government to circumvent restrictions imposed by due process and thereby act against citizens without technically committing any constitutional violation. Circumvention of due process is possible because due process has never truly reached surveillance activities proper. Indeed, the relationship between surveillance and due process reveals an essential divide in the nature of government power.
The divide separates fundamentally prospective government actions from fundamentally retrospective ones. The former includes efforts to gather as much information as possible about the state of the world and, more to the point, the existence of potential threats. The latter is concerned with the imposition of liability, criminal or otherwise, for undesirable events that have already occurred. The crucial fact is that due process is predominantly concerned with the integrity of the retrospective half of government power and, consequently, has relatively little to say about the prospective half. In the paradigmatic criminal investigation, the goal is to gather enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect committed the crime. Due process governs the evidence-finding process, ensuring the government does not build its case using abusive methods. Even when the government’s police power is used to prevent crime, the preventive activities are still directed toward some action that has already taken place, such as preparation for a crime in the case of a conspiracy “Purely” preventive activities, undertaken when concrete evidence of a crime does not exist, tends to be controversial. Indeed, the practice of “stop and frisk” has attracted criticism in large part because of concerns of arbitrary and racially skewed enforcement that have no basis in already completed actions. Although the standard of reasonable suspicion formally governs “stop and frisk” detentions, one is left with a lingering feeling that the police are targeting particular individuals because they “look” like would-be troublemakers.
The prospective use of government power, by contrast, is typically directed toward ends other than the imposition of liability for an already completed act. The usual purpose of intelligence gathering, for instance, is to enable the government to take action against potential threats to the state. Because intelligence gathering is not concerned with the imposition of penalties, it is not within the reach of the conventional notion of due process. Until recently, prospective activities were confined to the contexts of foreign surveillance and war. These activities typically had little effect on domestic citizens, as there was a clear divide between “foreign” and “domestic” activities. Before the 9/11 attacks, at least, it would have been difficult for the government to justify any desire to implement widespread surveillance of its own citizens. Presently, however, the threat---or perceived threat---of domestic domestic terrorism has provided adequate political support for domestic surveillance activities. While information gained through domestic surveillance is not formally admissible in court, it may nonetheless have a corrosive effect on civil liberties.
Corrosion of civil liberties by surveillance occurs through channels. First, surveillance enables targeted harassment of disfavored groups. Second, surveillance may enable the government to file subpoenas for information, thereby “unlocking” evidence for criminal prosecutions that would otherwise be impractical. In the first scenario, targeted harassment can have a significant chilling effect on public assembly. One needs only to consider the police response to Occupy Wall Street and its siblings to see the chilling effects in action. In principle, police departments are supposed to refrain from using force against members of the public unless necessary. In practice, however, police departments have significant latitude to use force. In cases where the use of force by police is questionable, it is not at all certain that some legal action will be brought to compel the police to justify the use of force. In cases where legal claims are brought, adjudication of the claims can take a long time. Would-be protestors are thus faced with a significant likelihood of police misconduct or brutality, with a comparatively small chance of obtaining redress should abuse occur. Individuals might thereby be deterred by assembling by the threat of a beating. In the second case, the abundance of information stored on social networks allows the government to obtain extensive information on the whereabouts of particular individuals. Facebook already regularly provides printouts of user profiles to law enforcement. Similar subpoenas might be expected for Gmail accounts, though the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act may provide additional constraints on the use of subpoenas.
In either case, the government can obtain vast amounts of information without needing to observe the formal strictures of due process. Left unchecked, the ability to know what every citizen is doing at any particular moment will tend to efface the boundaries that enable privacy, subjecting all aspects of life to monitoring at the government’s inclination. Preventing such intrusion will require more than isolated amendments of statutes. Rather, prevention will require courts to recognize a right of privacy with respect to information that individuals voluntarily turn over to third parties. This change, however, will require courts to give the idea of privacy a constitutional meaning that, as of the present, has yet to be articulated in constitutional doctrine.
Merely amending existing statutes is inadequate because the existing statutory framework conceives of privacy in terms of particular situations, in which the government may not intrude into some protected domain. This is the approach taken by the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”), the statute most relevant to online information-gathering by the government. The SCA illustrates the perils of tying privacy to particularized circumstances. The SCA, for instance, defines “communication” in a way that relies heavily on the idea of a point-to-point communication, which was paradigmatic in the era of landline phones. This definition, however, is unlikely to be adequate for safeguarding privacy in the era of social networking. Much information is contained is “status updates” and photographs, which do not fit the traditional idea of a point-to-point communication. Such communications are “semi-public” insofar as they are broadcast to a sizable audience, albeit one chosen specifically by the user. While the user might expect such information not to be disseminated beyond the selected audience, the reality is that Facebook regularly complies with requests from law enforcement for “neoprints,” or comprehensive printouts of information posted to user accounts. Because most information associated with Facebook accounts is of the semi-public variety, it is not clear that such information falls under the protection of the SCA. In any case, the government can resort to subpoenas when necessary.
The ready availability of Facebook data to the law enforcement creates an unprecedented risk of government overreach into the private sphere. With Facebook, targeted harassment of individuals or groups becomes much simpler to carry out. Information gathered from Facebook profiles might be used in later prosecutions, as obtaining such information is not considered a “search” or “seizure” under the Fourth Amendment.
Amending the SCA is unlikely to solve the problem. First, the SCA is rooted in point-to-point communications. To the extent that an effective amendment needs to expand the statute’s scope beyond the type of communication afforded by telephones, changing a basic definition of the statute may effectively require the rest of the statute to be rewritten. Even if particular definitions were found, it is likely that later technological developments will render the amendments obsolete.
What is needed, then, is a constitutional principle safeguarding privacy. While a constitutional amendment would be ideal, one could make do with revamped interpretations of existing constitutional provisions. The Ninth Amendment, for instance, might be interpreted to include a far-reaching “right to privacy” among the unenumerated rights retained by the people. A constitutional principle safeguarding privacy would plug the loopholes left by statutory interpretation, thereby allowing the public to avoid complete reliance on the Fourth Amendment as a safeguard of privacy. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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