https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/google_search_arrest/
the judge are not supposed to allowed fishing expeditions, but in this case, the lookup requested was quite narrow. they still requested a search warrant.
This seems to contract the fence a lot closer to 'thought crime'.
"Let's find all the people that committed X crime in this database."
It's insane with how much of this unconstitutional stuff the U.S. government has gotten away with, all because Congress has suffered from systemic corruption for decades and no longer cares about the little guy, in the sense that it's no longer that dependent on the "little guy" to keep their jobs (as Larry Lessig would put it).
If they can get donations from rich corporations or friends, it's fine by them to screw over the little guy, because that's mostly all they need to keep their jobs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)
> The way Justice Ginsburg saw it, Roe v. Wade was focused on the wrong argument — that restricting access to abortion violated a woman’s privacy. What she hoped for instead was a protection of the right to abortion on the basis that restricting it impeded gender equality, said Mary Hartnett, a law professor at Georgetown University who will be a co-writer on the only authorized biography of Justice Ginsburg.
Ginsberg realized that “equal protection” has the benefit of being in the constitution, while “privacy” nowhere appears in the document.[1] As the left has shifted away from social libertarianism, the ideological underpinning of Roe has become increasingly unsettled. That’s why in the recent confirmation hearings you only heard discussions of “super precedent” not any sort of debate about a sweeping privacy right.
[1] “Privacy” as an “unenumerated right” makes little sense under either liberal or conservative readings of the constitution. If you, like Scalia, believe that the “unenumerated rights” were those that were understood to exist at the time of the founding, then privacy isn’t one of those rights. But even if you subscribe to a “living constitution” view that fundamental rights can change over time—what’s the basis for your claim that “privacy” is generally recognized as a fundamental right today? I’m not aware of any constitutional court in the world that has embraced a notion of “privacy” broad enough to include both abortion and freedom from surveillance. Around the same time as Roe courts in Canada, France, Italy, and Germany declined to recognize any right to an abortion. The first three found it to be a legislative matter. The latter found legalizing abortion to be unconstitutional as a violation of the German Basic Law’s right to life.
The constitution and subsequent amendments merely outline which rights the government may violate as a matter of necessity to run, and certain rights which it may not violate at all.
As you say, privacy is not mentioned; it does exist as a right but has no explicit protection except for the conditions in the 4th and 5th.
Of course, the federal government's role has grown so much, and the interstate clause abuse has basically expanded it's power to encompass anything and everything, it is not unreasonable to think that the first 10 amendments are the only rights we have anymore :/
Scalia believed strongly in the right to privacy and privacy was certainly considered a right at the time of the constitution. I'm not sure where your source got that idea, but it's easy to document otherwise.
https://iapp.org/news/a/scalias-privacy-impact-will-be-felt-...
"A machine that sees through walls, reasoned Scalia, in order to capture the heat emanating from lamps used to grow marijuana, infringes upon individuals’ reasonable expectation of privacy, even when law enforcement is positioned outside the house."
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html
"In United States v. Jones, probably the most important Fourth Amendment case since the 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, Scalia, writing for the majority, required the police to obtain a warrant prior to attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s car. While basing his opinion on narrow property grounds, Scalia rejected the government’s claim that individuals had no expectation of privacy while driving in broad daylight on city streets."
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/10-1259.html
"In Florida v. Jardines, Scalia, again writing a 5-4 decision supported by three liberal justices and Justice Thomas, held that police use of a trained detection dog to sniff for narcotics on the front porch of a private home was, indeed, a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The consequences of Jardines, as well as other dog sniffing cases, are far broader than for just narcotics searches. They implicate suspicion-less searches by other mechanized sniffers – for example, think about keyword searches of communications contents and metadata for cybersecurity or intelligence purposes."
Scalia believed in protection from government trespass on private property. That's a sort of "privacy" but its based on property rights, which was the original understanding of the fourth amendment.
It takes a pretty creative reading of the constitution to infer a right to privacy, then infer that that grants the right to an abortion.
One of the criticisms of Roe is that states were legalizing abortion on their own already, so doing it through the court angered people more than if it had happened in each state, and it's build on shaky constitutional underpinning, so it's not necessarily a robust decision.
Why hasn't a right to privacy amendment been discussed at all? Or even a Privacy Rights Act? Those would clarify things too.
I suspect that approach will have to change with the current composition of the Supreme Court.
Note that the constitution gives any 25% of the country "veto power" as far as amendments go. Folks are, yes, going to actually have to find privacy laws and amendments that significantly benefit almost everyone. And actually convince them of that.
Corporations like google are somewhere between neutral and pro-privacy, or rather, against sharing their data with law enforcement.
Where money-politics does play, it's probably apathy related. This isn't an issue that donors care much about, therefore legislators may not care much.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated[.]
While digital records can easily be considered “papers” the function of the possessive adjective “their” in English hasn’t changed since 1791. A person can complain about an unreasonable search of their digital papers. They can’t complain about the digital search of someone else’s digital papers, like Google’s IP logs.
Section 215 used to allow the FBI to apply to the FISA court for “an order requiring the production of any tangible things”—a subpoena duces tecum. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/subpoena_duces_tecum
That legal instrument has been in use since the 1600s, and was imported into American law. Until the 20th century, nobody thought it was an unreasonable search under the 4th amendment for the government to subpoena documents where the person complaining about the subpoena had no property interest in the materials: https://commons.stmarytx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=105...
Of course under a “living constitution” style reasoning you can do whatever you want. (After all many people think there is a right to “privacy” in the constitution, when it never uses that word, but think there is no right to own firearms, which is right there in black and beige!) We are probably well on our way to that with the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Carpenter which found the fourth amendment protected cell phone location information. But if you care about what the Constitution actually says, it’s difficult to understand why a defendant can complain about a fourth amendment violation for a subpoena demanding that Google turn over Google’s IP logs.
Google searches are tricky for sure. I'm asking Google to look something up for me. What I looked up is their record.
But for example, video rentals are specifically protected as are library checkout records. Even though I've asked those places to do something for me, they can't reveal that.
So yeah, it's tricky, but at the end of the day it should probably count as my personal property.
If you take the view GDPR takes, most data about the person is their data.
>> and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm not a lawyer, but, from what I understand, probable cause refers to whether the law was violated by the party subject to the warrant. If Google has not violated the law, then what is probable cause referring to?
Why would they even risk showing ill-gotten evidence? It would be way easier to just keep that evidence secret and have a cop stand in the right spot to arrest the mark as they go about their usual routine. They probably "look suspicious".
"But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather"
…because it turns out it is legal to go the other way around and ask the provider for a list of people who searched for a certain keyword: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-is-giving-data-to-police-ba...
"There are few things as revealing as a person's search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect."