The Fourth Amendment is dying and we’re all the murderers, according to 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals Chief Justice Alex Kozinski and his law clerk Stephanie Grace. In an article for TheDaily.com titled “Pulling Plug on Privacy; How Technology Helped Make Privacy Obsolete,” Kozinski and Grace eulogize the Fourth Amendment, recognizing the diminished expectation of privacy that every American has today.

With the increased use of smart phones that track our GPS location at every moment, police no longer need a warrant to track your everyday movements. In a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, individuals who communicate information to another person no longer have an expectation of privacy regarding that information (United States v. White, 1971). It is by this logic that government agencies are able to obtain information about your everyday movements without a warrant. The agencies argue that since you have sent that data via your smartphone to your cell phone provider, they do not need a warrant to obtain that information from your cell phone provider.

The problem with this logic is that most people reasonably believe that they are not subject to being tracked by the government simply because they own a smartphone.