Kidnap of the Fourth Amendment
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.
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This has led more 'progressive' figures like MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Ed Shultz to support the clear violation of the Fourth Amendment in the name of security. Matthews suggested that the Obama administration had no choice but to implement these measures, because if there were to be another terrorist attack, they would be blamed for not keeping Americans sufficiently safe. Shultz expressed on air the confusing position that resorting to profiling was "trading liberty for security," but the invasive pat downs are justified because only around two percent of Americans are having to endure it. He even stated it was OK because counter-terrorism experts say it is necessary.
In other words, the FBI is keeping track of a lot of information about private citizens and obtaining it without warrants. Moreover, the Bureau wants to quadruple the staff of the tracking program to allow them to better keep an eye on all the terrorists this is supposedly going to catch.
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