We can think about it this way. The United States (well, certain bureaus) do not believe that the Bill of Rights contains unalienable rights because:
1.) Foreigners ("aliens") are not 'given' what is presumably 'unalienable' to them (e.g. GitMo)
2.) Snowden Docs (in particular the US) shows how intelligence agencies will spy on one anothers' citizens on their behalf to skirt domestic law. A serious commitment to unreasonable searches and seizures would entail protecting citizens rights from foreign actors, not encouraging it. And it would also refrain from doing it to others.
3.) Fair trials are suspended where convenient, even before executions (e.g. Americans overseas, Bin Laden).
By tautological definition there are no 'extreme' circumstances under which natupal rights are no longer granted; for natural rights are not given, cannot be taken away, suspended or invalidated by geolocation.
While we recognize in a moral and philosophical sense today that we should treat all people of the globe identically, that isn't the group of people the Fourth Amendment protects. In a general sense, people in other countries are not subject to American law (despite being part of the same humanity and, we can agree, deserving of being treated with respect). If people and objects in other countries were subject to American law, there is a deep sense in which there would only be one country (The United States) with charming colonies labelled things like "Iceland" on maps.
The rights are really limitations on the American government, so it's not "subjecting" anyone to anything, and there's no reason limitations on the US government couldn't apply to how it treats people all over the globe. It's no imposition on the sovereignty of Iceland for the US not allow itself to hack into servers there.
Moreover, in practice, it's way more complicated than you're implying. The Supreme Court has been clear that the geographical location of a US citizen actually doesn't matter at all:
> When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land. [1]
So it's not just "people in other countries", and presumably the same thing applies to his property being in that other country.
And it's not just citizenship that matters: foreigners on US soil are protected by much of the Constitution, even undocumented immigrants [2]. So apparently neither location nor citizenship strip you of your rights. However--and this is the weird part--for some reason the combination matters: foreigners on foreign soil are not afforded the protections of the Constitution. See e.g. [3].
[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/354/1 [2] http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/rightsandfreedoms/a/illegalrig... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Verdugo-Urquid...
An important point you made, though:
> The rights are really limitations on the American government [...] It's no imposition on the sovereignty of Iceland for the US not allow itself to hack into servers there.
This is pointing in the key direction I was trying to go. I feel we _should_ hold ourselves to a higher standard, and I suspect there is no substantial barrier legally. But judges are rarely in the business of "should", otherwise we wouldn't have rule of law. Hence my comment about him seeming to just do his job in this case.
Anyhow, you got my upvote. :)
No disagreement there. But that doesn't mean that the document grants the right. It merely recognizes the rights.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
These rights are not granted by the United States. The United States cannot grant or take away natural rights. That's what they are and how they were intended to work.
Also, there are limits on those rights. There's one example in the opinion; if the police somewhere else discover some incriminating information about you and voluntarily pass it along to American police, it is admissible regardless of whether the foreign investigation would have been valid under the 4th amendment if initiated by American law enforcement.
As a simple example, imagine a drug bust in Thailand which would not be 4th amendment compliant turns up evidence that 50% of the money from the drug operation is always send to John Doe, who lives on 123 Main Street in Anytown, USA. The FBI duly arrests John Doe and he's charges with international drug trafficking. The Thai evidence is admissible notwithstanding the non-compliance of Thai investigative procedures with US law.
This isn't meant to be an analogy for this case, BTW, just an illustration of one limiting case.
But the FBI, and US DoJ, operate under some interpretation of the verbiage in the US Constitution. That interpretation has come to mean less and less protection against searches and seizures over the years, as the US Supreme Court interprets what the (to me) plain and simple language of the 4th amendment says.
Second, you think the Framers thought they were limiting rights to US citizens. When did the Constitution first even mentioned the notion of citizenship?
But it's an easy mistake to make because it's a totally archaic word.
That's the least effective rebuttal I've heard in a while.
Obviously the government is going to do whatever it can to prosecute the guy, rules be damned.
39 U.S.C. § 4057 specifically requires a warrant for certain classes of mail and parcels, and therefore any evidence obtained in a warrantless search would be inadmissible.
Of course, it doesn't mean that such evidence would be especially compelling to a judge or jury in those circumstances, but that's a separate matter.
If I gave you a box and asked you to give it to someone else, you have the legal right to open it up and do whatever you want to it. The most I could do is sue you, civilly, for breaking a defined contract if one was in place, but for the most part I'd be limited to calling you names.
Contract law in USA is that weak? They have authority? As in the law authorises anyone to access anything just by virtue of being contracted to move it, not even ownership? Contractual obligation can't override that authorisation .. are you sure?
That would mean, for example, that your taxi-driver has the right to go through your bags by virtue of you asking them to put them in their car. Or that Starbucks have a _right_ to access your laptop if you left it in the store for any length of time. Or if you park in a private parking lot the owner could break in, hot wire and drive your car around.
Or are you saying that only certain possessions are treated as if you didn't own them and only certain companies contracts are treated as null?
tl;dr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels, but yes it's a tort.
But most likely, the contract with UPS/FedEx/etc would afford broad abilities to inspect and search packages for "safety and quality control" reasons, or whatever else.
To take his example, if I carelessly left my laptop in a Starbucks, I have not given anyone the right to use, transport or otherwise inspect my laptop. I can assume some right to privacy over the contents of it. But if I gave my laptop to a company that specializes in transporting laptops between Starbucks locations on behalf of patrons, one can pretty much assume (given today's contract binding society) that they have some clause in the contract between us that says that they are not responsible maintaining the content of the laptop, and can at their discretion open it up and inspect the contents to be sure that they are not the facilitator in transporting illegal or "bad" data (malware source code, child porn or terrorist manifestos, etc). They don't have the explicit right to open it just because, but in giving it to them I've given them the right to do so.
Note that the rule doesn't require suppression of just any evidence obtained illegally -- only evidence obtained in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights (and, in particular, his right to privacy). Relatedly, note that the suppression rule is not actually written into the Fourth Amendment. It is a judicial creation to deter particularly egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule#Limitations_o...
You're right, if they ask that third party to see it. But if they don't ask, they hack in, then they're breaking the USC that protects against unauthorised access to computer systems [18 USC 1030?].
The third party usually will have a legal requirement not to divulge your info without a warrant (except perhaps under conditions threatening national security). I'm not sure on this for USA, most countries have laws protecting personal information; your contract binds the company to not disclose information but a warrant supersedes that ... but presumably there's not a general regulation forcing companies to disclose information to authorities who merely request it as opposed to getting a warrant. That would be most undemocratic.
Thus under rule of law, despite the Fourth not applying, the FBI would still need to get a warrant before either hacking in or making the company disclose the information, no?
Like, they can open your mailbox as the postal service own it, but if it's locked then they'd need to get the key/authorisation from the owner (or they'd break the law, breaking and entering or bypassing security or somesuch). If the owner says "no" then they'd need a warrant (legally speaking) to force the owner to open the box and take your post out. If they just break in and take the post it's not a Fourth Amendment violation against you, AFAICT, but it's still unlawful.
IMO the evidence should still be used but the fact of the evidence being obtained means that if submitted by the state it's also evidence that a person working for the state committed a crime. Rule of law means that person should be tried as should any co-conspirators. But this last para is just my idea of democratic responsibility and not how things are.
Which makes it even stranger, because I don't know how the judge would reconcile that theory with the third-party doctrine, which (in my layman's understanding) seems to be about what you said; namely that since some person(s) shared all the information in the image with the ISP, it wouldn't be subject to anyone's Fourth Amendment protection. Or is there some line between a hosted email account and a VPS; where the email has been "shared" with the host, but the VPS's contents can't sufficiently be shown to have been "shared" and thus are still protected? [1]
[1] https://www.quora.com/Fourth-Amendment/Does-the-third-party-...
EDIT: I am concerned, the further I go in this search, that the reason they seem not to speak of the rights of foreigners as inalienable may be because e.g. so many foreigners are black or Chinese, and you didn't even get a rights guarantee back then if you were American-born and black or Chinese (not that there were a lot of Chinese people there at the time -- burning down their houses and threatening to kill them if they didn't leave comes later in American history, with similar problems for Japanese people even _later_ in American history), so there was just no chance anyone would even possibly consider the hilarious joke that we'd give rights guarantees to foreigners.
Could be off-base, but the context back then was... decidedly less progressive than we'd like to imagine them now.
Now find me a lawyer who reads the Constitution this way.
If the servers aren't his, how can he say his privacy was violated? Therefore, the violation is contingent on establishing it was his, which he hadn't done.