It's going to be clearly silly for most people to say that multibillion dollar corporations are allowed to conduct unlimited surveillance on you, but the government can't. The 4A was encoding a legal right to the societal expectation of privacy. We've spent the last 30 years blithely destroying that social expectation via tech. Of course no one much is up in arms in it now - we've trained it out. Big Data and the Fourth Amendment are antitheses. Even if you were to somehow rile up enough people to force some sort of legislation against stuff like this, it's going to happen anyway, illegally, and they'll find a way to get away with it. Consider the myriad abuses of the CIA and NSA. What happened when the CIA spied on Congress illegally as Congress investigated their other illegal actions, and then got caught, then lied about what they were doing? Absolutely nothing, and the guy in charge is now considered a hero by a whole political faction and is a frequent media commentator expounding his opinions as a Trustworthy Expert.
In a world where you're dealing with human beings, you can't have giant repositories of extremely useful data in centralized locations and think that a "don't look at this" sign is going to do you any good. You have to not have giant centralized repositories of data people care about. The Fourth Amendment could only effectively exist in a world where privacy was valued and invading it meant breaking into someone’s home, or his lawyer’s office, or paying people to follow him around all day.
And in fact our use of technology definitely contributed to this, even when it seemed very innocuous. Logging is invaluable for testing and troubleshooting, forum posts, DMs, login data, and tweets obviously have more value as things that are non-ephemeral...but what you do by logging everything, what you do by having an Internet where things are by default non-ephemeral is change exactly this societal expectation.
Going back to the helicopter example in this thread, would we argue that the government shouldn't be allowed to look at the aerial view on maps.google.com? The very existence of this service changed what people understood as private.
Corporations can’t put you in jail and that’s why the 4th amendment needs to be strong now more than ever. The government should be required to get warrants and not just be able to buy that data.
It's one thing to say they shouldn't be able to do it and we need to pass a law, it's another to create a world where they actually can't, and aren't incentivized to.
As a whole separate question, do you think companies and individuals should be banned from voluntarily giving data to the police, out of ideological motives or generosity or whatever? That also just intuitively seems weird. Charging a fee for something you're happy to do is just a small jump. The problem is the mass collection of data in the first place. Once you have that, the rest is inevitable. Mass data collection is a massive qualitative change to what we had before.
If you want it all to stop, that means banning the collection of data. This of course won't eliminate it altogether, and it will wipe out a lot of the tech industry, but it will go a long way, and proving someone has collected data they weren't supposed to is a lot easier than proving they shared it inappropriately.
It’s to the point where we need a new amendment to bolster the 4th in the modern era.
Not saying we SHOULD need one. Because I agree the spirit (and honestly the letter) of the 4th covers us. But clearly bad actors are winning the fight right now.
Surprisingly, that's not at all what we've seen. For example in Carpenter vs. United States, the Supreme Court was asked whether tracking someone via cell-transaction records required a warrant under the 4th amendment. Chief Justice Roberts and the Court's liberal justices said "yes, it is a violation because citizens should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements." Meanwhile the most prominent originalists (Thomas, Gorsuch as well as Alito) filed dissenting opinions lamenting the decision, saying that the 4th amendment doesn't provide any protection for these records.
Anyway ordinarily I wouldn't respond to a political rant, but I do think it's important for HN readers to know what the most important judges in the country are actually saying on this point.
Also, as of now SCOTUS has decided a right to privacy doesn't exist within the Constitution. They were willing to get rid of that in order to overturn Roe V. Wade.
The problem with wanting an originalist interpretation of the Constitution is that the Constitution doesn't really say what most people think it does.
But would they seem like papers to someone in the 1700s? "Papers" in that context are physical documents, parchment and ink.
That's the problem with Constitutional originalism - it boils down to interpreting the mind of an imaginary ghost, which fundamentally leads to justifying confirmation bias by proxy.
Should LE be allowed to look at all the recipients of your snail mail without a warrant? Absolutely not. They, therefore, should not be allowed to read your call logs. It’s basically the same.
If you really want to get technical, the Supreme Court has no business in judicial review, as that is not explicitly stated in the Constitution. Marbury v Madison is more tradition than anything.
An originalist analogy would be the government spotting something with their naked eye from a boat that isn’t visible from land. I don’t think that would be unconstitutional. If someone in a helicopter is using their naked eye to look at your one property, that seems to be in a different category from e.g. thermal imaging everyone from space.
I mean, any distance is going to be arbitrary. And “people might lie” is a bad reason to reject a rule. (It’s a good reason to raise the burden of evidence.)
Imagine saying out loud with a straight face that it’s not a search because you’re in the sky.
Defence didn’t allege the cops lied. This case wasn’t about lying cops.
> no reasonable civilian pilot would be flying so low
This argument has merit. That said, civilians don’t slowly patrol neighbourhoods either. So I’m not sure where the threshold is for what cops can do on patrol.