The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants:warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate,justified by probable cause,supported by oath or affirmation,and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
A pen register,or dialed number recorder (DNR),is a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register,including programs monitoring Internet communications.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is a United States federal law that establishes procedures for the surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence on domestic soil.
Katz v. United States,389 U.S. 347 (1967),was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court redefined what constitutes a "search" or "seizure" with regard to the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The ruling expanded the Fourth Amendment's protections from an individual's "persons,houses,papers,and effects",as specified in the Constitution's text,to include any areas where a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy". The reasonable expectation of privacy standard,now known as the Katz test,was formulated in a concurring opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan II.
Kyllo v. United States,533 U.S. 27 (2001),was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the court ruled that the use of thermal imaging devices to monitor heat radiation in or around a person's home,even if conducted from a public vantage point,is unconstitutional without a search warrant. In its majority opinion,the court held that thermal imaging constitutes a "search" under the Fourth Amendment,as the police were using devices to "explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion." The ruling has been noted for refining the reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine in light of new surveillance technologies,and when those are used in areas that are accessible to the public. This case has been praised by legal scholars since the Court refused to be the arbiter to determine "what is and is not intimate" and thus worthy of protection. Instead,the Court opted to focus on "the invasiveness of the technology itself" and its ability to enable all kinds of government surveillance in the home.
Reggie Barnett Walton is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He is a former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
NSA warrantless surveillance —also commonly referred to as "warrantless-wiretapping" or "-wiretaps" —was the surveillance of persons within the United States,including U.S. citizens,during the collection of notionally foreign intelligence by the National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. In late 2001,the NSA was authorized to monitor,without obtaining a FISA warrant,phone calls,Internet activities,text messages and other forms of communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S.,even if the other end of the communication lays within the U.S.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11,2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program,which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA,a signals intelligence agency,implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005,The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature,igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works,such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory,described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much,much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article,former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
George Edward MacKinnon was an American politician,attorney,and judge who variously served as a United States representative and United States Attorney for Minnesota,and as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He is also the father of feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon.
Anna Katherine Diggs Taylor was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Norman "Kim" Maleng was an American attorney and politician who served as the King County Prosecuting Attorney for 28 years. He was also an architect of Washington's Sentencing Reform Act.
George Hugo Boldt was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Robert Stephen Lasnik is an American attorney and jurist,who serves as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.
James Robertson was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia from 1994 until his retirement in June 2010. Robertson also served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from 2002 until December 2005,when he resigned from that court in protest against warrantless wiretapping.
Nicholas Merrill is an American system administrator,computer programmer,and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Calyx Internet Access,an Internet and hosted service provider founded in 1995,and of the non-profit Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act and consequently the first person to have a National Security Letter gag order completely lifted.
United States v. Jones,565 U.S. 400 (2012),was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that installing a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device on a vehicle and using the device to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
United States v. Graham,846 F. Supp. 2d 384,was a Maryland District Court case in which the Court held that historical cell site location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Reacting to the precedent established by the recent Supreme Court case United States v. Jones in conjunction with the application of the third party doctrine,Judge Richard D. Bennett found that "information voluntarily disclosed to a third party ceases to enjoy Fourth Amendment protection" because that information no longer belongs to the consumer,but rather to the telecommunications company that handles the transmissions records. The historical cell site location data is then not subject to the privacy protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment standard of probable cause,but rather to the Stored Communications Act,which governs the voluntary or compelled disclosure of stored electronic communications records.
The mosaic theory is a legal doctrine in American courts for considering issues of information collection,government transparency,and search and seizure,especially in cases involving invasive or large-scale data collection by government entities. The theory takes its name from mosaic tile art:while an entire picture can be seen from a mosaic's tiles at a distance,no clear picture emerges from viewing a single tile in isolation. The mosaic theory calls for a cumulative understanding of data collection by law enforcement and analyzes searches "as a collective sequence of steps rather than individual steps."
Jabari Brooks Wamble is an American lawyer who is a former nominee to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. He is a former nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
United States v. Gratkowski,964 F.3d 307,was a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit involving the Fourth Amendment implications of Bitcoin transactions.
