NPR on privacy in the digital era

NPR has aired a segment on "Your digital trail: does the fourth amendment protect us?" This amendment of the Bill Rights, ratified in 1791, is about "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The piece explains how, basically, the interplay of information technologies and of interpretation by the courts have gutted this amendment:

"But since the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court and other courts have issued a series of rulings declaring that the government does not need a search warrant to obtain your personal documents if you have already shared them with somebody else. For instance, since you allow your bank and credit card company to know what you buy, and since you let your phone company know whom you call, you can't claim that information is private."

So, when you send an email, you have shared it with the Internet provider, so that it is not private anymore. You can apply the same interpretation to your location: if you use your mobile phone, you share your location with the phone company, so that it is not a private information anymore.


This is important because, once you have shared information with someone,

"instead of a search warrant, the police might just need a subpoena — which is "trivially easy to issue," says Bankston of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Law enforcement doesn't need a judge's approval to obtain subpoenas — prosecutors can sign them on their own, as can authorized employees at federal and state agencies. And law enforcement agents don't need evidence that there's likely a crime. They need only to be able to show that the records they want are relevant to an investigation."

For instance, even divorce lawyers in many states can issue subpoenas themselves and obtain that kind of information.


The bottom line to me is that lawyers have made the US a kind of scary country...