Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
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.