Coronavirus
Disease Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment
With the right safeguards, aggressive disease surveillance is likely permissible under the Fourth Amendment.
Latest in Fourth Amendment
With the right safeguards, aggressive disease surveillance is likely permissible under the Fourth Amendment.
The Washington Post reported recently that ICE has accessed a Maryland facial recognition database, which includes photographs of undocumented immigrants who obtained special driver’s licenses.
In a federal prosecution for armed bank robbery, a defendant challenges a geofence warrant.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications under Section 702 does not violate the Fourth Amendment, but raised constitutional questions related to querying databases containing these communications.
In Commonwealth v. Jones, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held, for the second time in five years, that the government may compel a defendant to unlock an electronic device under certain circumstances.
In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment applies when the government acquires large amounts of cell-phone location data.
Last June in a 5-4 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court extended Fourth Amendment protections to an individual’s cell phone location data for the first time.
The Fifth Circuit has handed down a fascinating computer search case in United States v. Reddick. Here's the question: If a private company runs a hash of a file and compares the hash to those of known images of child pornography, and it finds a match to a known image and forwards on the file to the government, is it a “search” for the government to then open the file to confirm it is child pornography?
In a fascinating decision, Naperville Smart Meter Awareness v. City of Naperville, the Seventh Circuit has held that a public utility commits a "search" of a home when it records every 15 minutes how much electricity the utility is providing the home, at least until the smart readers that enable this data collection come into general public use.
Writing for the majority in Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts called the court’s momentous Fourth Amendment decision “a narrow one.” The specific holding—that a warrant is required for law enforcement to access historical cell site location information (CSLI)—may indeed be narrow, and the decision rightfully cautions that “the Court must tread carefully” when considering new technologies.