Articles Tagged with fourth amendment

Two items relevant to the internet, privacy, and the Fourth Amendment.  Orwell would be . . .

Orin S. Kerr, Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet:  A General Approach, 62(4) STANFORD L. REV. 1005 (2010).

This Article proposes a general approach to applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will try to apply the Fourth Amendment to the Internet so that the Fourth Amendment has the same basic function online that it has offline. The Article reaches two major conclusions. First, Fourth Amendment protections online should depend on whether the data is content or non-content information. The contents of communications, like e-mail and remotely stored files, ordinarily should be protected. On the other hand, non-content information, such as IP addresses and e-mail addresses, ordinarily should not be protected. Second, courts should ordinarily require a search warrant if the government seeks to obtain the contents of protected Internet communications. Further, the scope of warrants should be based on individual users rather than individual accounts.

Thanks to howappealing.law.com, here is a Ohio State Supreme Court opinion in State v. Smith.  The issue is warrantless searches of cell-phones.  While this issue may have been raised in a court-martial, I don’t see a relevant military appellate decision.  So the issue is apparently an open one for court-martial cases.

Here is a link to a New York Times editorial on the Ohio case.

The Ohio Supreme Court has struck an important blow for privacy rights, ruling that the police need a warrant to search a cellphone. The court rightly recognized that cellphones today are a lot more than just telephones, that they hold a wealth of personal information and that the privacy interest in them is considerable. This was the first such ruling from a state supreme court. It is a model for other courts to follow.

Contact Information