Fourth Amendment Eroded

[happyg]

Amie Stepanovich
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans' right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. But government lawyers have argued repeatedly that this right should be limited, and the Supreme Court has often agreed. Amie Stepanovich, director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, offers three ways the government has attempted to erode Fourth Amendment protections.
1.They've worked around it. In 1979, the Supreme Court denied constitutional protection to information voluntarily turned over to third parties. The government argues this permits warrantless collection of, among other things, information about Web visits, phone calls, location, and banking data.
2.They've limited its scope. The Supreme Court has said that Fourth Amendment protections don't apply in all places or at all times. For example, U.S. borders have become, practically speaking, Constitution-free zones. And the Department of Homeland Security has decided that the border consists of all land and sea boundaries, and extends out for 100 miles, placing the majority of the U.S. population within that region.
3.They've limited its application. The government argues that nothing that occurs in public is actually a search. Public-space surveillance has been traditionally limited by available resources. But new technology like GPS tracking makes it easy to surreptitiously monitor a person's location and activities in public.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/29/fourth-amendment-eroded

[truth_seeker]

Define "unreasonable?"

[Fishrrman]

Article title:
"Fourth Amendment Eroded"

Here's how to shore it up.
With a new Constitutional Amendment that enumerates a citizen's God-given "right of privacy". It should read like this:
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Citizens protected by this Constitution possess an inalienable right to privacy in their persons, business, and homes, and while they are in public.

It shall be a violation of this Constitution for the United States or for the several States to violate or invade the individual privacy of citizens by use of physical, mechanical, or electronic means or by the use of devices on land, on water, below the ground, or from the air.

This protection shall extend to all lawful communications and acts by an individual citizen or between two or more citizens, including content that is spoken, written, or electronically transmitted. It shall extend to citizens regardless of their location, whether in private or in public.

The only exceptions will be as governed by the Fourth Amendment of this Constitution.
=============================

Four short paragraphs that anyone can understand.
Even Republicans ...
(the RINO ones, I mean....)    :)

[Oceander]

Define "unreasonable?"

Thank you.

[truth_seeker]

Thank you.

Everybody is a jail house lawyer these days, informed ONLY or mostly by their biases.

Back in analog days, the telephone company had a record of all calls made, from and to.

The investigating authority, based on a warrant, showing reasonable cause, would extract from those phone company records, the data for a particular phone number specified in the warrant.

IOW the phone companies' records constituted the "metadata" on paper from computer printouts.

Now the NSA and probably others, gather "metadata" of a like nature. In each case the metadata is the haystack, from which specifics will later be available.

What should be in question is NOT the haystack, or metadata gathering. It should be the process by which law enforcement narrows down their searches, and what proceeds thereafter.