Brownstone Institute: A Fourth Amendment for the 21st century

Brownstone Institute: A Fourth Amendment for the 21st century by Daniel Nuncio (“‘Twentieth-century Fourth Amendment law was really written for a world before computers,’ stated Reilly Stephens, an attorney with the Liberty Justice Center, in an early September interview. ‘It was literally written before any kind of modern computers – certainly before cell phones and all those things – and there were these assumptions built into the law that were really based around resource constraints.’ ‘[Samuel] Alito talks about this in his concurrence in Jones…’ said Stephens, referencing a 2012 Supreme Court case regarding the placement of a GPS tracking device on a car by law enforcement. ‘[Alito] says it used to be we said the cops can watch anything you do in public because if you’re in public you don’t have any expectation of privacy.’ ‘Any privacy in public Americans thought they had prior to the age of modern computers and an ever-growing list of low-cost connected devices came from resource constraints, Stephens explained.’”)