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- Reason: Miami Sheriff Hired a Private Law Firm To Pursue—and Profit From—Asset Forfeiture Cases
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- OH12: Officer’s violation of knock-and-announce statute justifies suppression
- Reason: Documents Reveal the Postal Service’s Broad Surveillance of Political Activists
- CA4: Not having child in a booster seat justified stop
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Feedspot’s Best Legal Blogs and Websites 2023-2026,
also, firm website Top 90 Criminal Law Blogs 2026 -
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ABA Journal Web 100, Best Law Blogs (2015-17) (then discontinued)
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by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com
Search and Seizure (6th ed. 2025)
www.johnwesleyhall.com -
© 2003-26,
online since Feb. 24, 2003 Approx. 600,000 visits (non-robot) since 2012 Approx. 50,000 posts since 2003 (29,000 on WordPress as of 12/31/25) -
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Fourth Amendment cases, citations, and links -
Latest Slip Opinions:
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Foreign Intell.Surv.Ct.
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State courts (and some USDC opinions)
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To search Search and Seizure on Lexis.com $ -
Research Links:
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General (many free):
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F.R.Crim.P. 41
www.fd.org
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center Resources
FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (2008) (pdf)
DEA Agents Manual (2002) (download)
DOJ Computer Search Manual (2009) (pdf)
Stringrays (ACLU No. Cal.) (pdf)
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Congressional Research Service:
--Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Outline of Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping (2012)
--Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping (2012)
--Federal Laws Relating to Cybersecurity: Discussion of Proposed Revisions (2012)
ACLU on privacy
Privacy Foundation
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NACDL’s Domestic Drone Information Center
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Criminal Appeal (post-conviction) (9th Cir.)
Section 1983 Blog -
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't."
—Me -
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well."
–Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others) -
“I am still learning.”
—Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)). -
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud -
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848) -
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984). -
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence."
—Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961). -
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987). -
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today."
— Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting). -
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property."
—Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765) -
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment."
—United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting) -
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). -
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987) -
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967) -
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
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“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989) -
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969) -
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp] -
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.”
– John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper -
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime."
—Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948) -
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
Website design by Wally Waller, Colorado Springs. 
Category Archives: Surveillance technology
Vox: Recode: App trackers secretly sell your location data to the government. App stores won’t stop them.
Vox: Recode: App trackers secretly sell your location data to the government. App stores won’t stop them. By Sara Morrison (“Google can’t stop trackers in its apps from selling location data to the government. Maybe the government can.”)
Techdirt: Treasury Oversight Says IRS Should Consider Getting Warrants Before Buying Location Data From Data Brokers
Techdirt: Treasury Oversight Says IRS Should Consider Getting Warrants Before Buying Location Data From Data Brokers by Tim Cushing (“Last October, Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren asked the IRS’s oversight to take a look at the agency’s use of … Continue reading
The Intercept: LAPD Sought Ring Home Security Video Related to Black Lives Matter Protests
The Intercept: LAPD Sought Ring Home Security Video Related to Black Lives Matter Protests by Sam Biddle (“Emails obtained from the Los Angeles Police Department show that the department sought protest-related footage from Amazon’s Ring home camera systems in the … Continue reading
NYT: Opinion: They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them.
NYT: Opinion: They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them. By Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson (“Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data.”)
CBS Baltimore: Baltimore’s Board Of Estimates Ends Agreement With Company Running Aerial Surveillance Program
CBS Baltimore: Baltimore’s Board Of Estimates Ends Agreement With Company Running Aerial Surveillance Program (“The Baltimore City Board of Estimates on Wednesday unanimously approved ending the city’s agreement with the company undertaking the controversial aerial surveillance program. In April 2020, … Continue reading
The Intercept: How The LAPD And Palantir Use Data To Justify Racist Policing
The Intercept: How The LAPD And Palantir Use Data To Justify Racist Policing by Mara Hvistendahl (“In a new book, a sociologist who spent months embedded with the LAPD details how data-driven policing techwashes bias.”)
WUSA9: DC residents get visits from FBI as agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
WUSA9: DC residents get visits from FBI as agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol by Bruce Lashon (“A DC woman said an FBI agent contacted her and said investigators were reaching out to the owner of every … Continue reading
NPR: Maryland Man Arrested After GPS Unit Allegedly Shows He Was At Capitol Riot
NPR: Maryland Man Arrested After GPS Unit Allegedly Shows He Was At Capitol Riot by Austin Austermuhle (“A Silver Spring man who prosecutors say is a professed white supremacist has been charged for illegally entering and remaining in a restricted … Continue reading
NJLJ: Commentary: Use of Facial Recognition Following Capitol Siege Highlights Issues Seen in NJ Case
NJLJ: Commentary: Use of Facial Recognition Following Capitol Siege Highlights Issues Seen in NJ Case by David Gialanella (“This case, it now appears, will be one of many. The mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol has prompted calls for the … Continue reading
NPR: War On Terror Birthed Pentagon’s Automated Biometrics Identification System
NPR: War On Terror Birthed Pentagon’s Automated Biometrics Identification System by Steve Inskeep (“NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks to investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, author of the new book, First Platoon, about how the U.S. has employed the use of biometric data … Continue reading
CNS: LA Police Commission Adopts Oversight Measures for Facial Recognition Tool
CNS: LA Police Commission Adopts Oversight Measures for Facial Recognition Tool by Martin Macias Jr. (“The LAPD’s promise of robust oversight for facial recognition technology in police work hasn’t quelled concerns from civil liberties groups that the tools will perpetuate … Continue reading
Geofence warrants can be used to identify those who invaded the Capitol, not to mention Facebook warrants
The government’s prior use of geofence warrants were a prelude to this: With the invasion of the Capitol on Wednesday, the government now can attempt to locate all the cell phones inside the Capitol to identify those to potentially charge. … Continue reading
NBC News: Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis
NBC News: Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis by Olivia Solon (“Looser privacy standards for vehicle data are a treasure chest of data for law enforcement.”)
Vox: The real cost of smart speakers
Vox: The real cost of smart speakers by Sam Ellis (“But essentially, smart speakers are microphones that connect to the internet. And they come with a hidden cost: some of our privacy. After listening to our questions and demands, these … Continue reading
NBC News: Police in Jackson, Mississippi, want access to live home security video, alarming privacy advocates
NBC News: Police in Jackson, Mississippi, want access to live home security video, alarming privacy advocates by Jon Schuppe & Bracey Harris (“Civil liberties advocates warn that a new surveillance tool will put people’s everyday household activities under potential scrutiny … Continue reading
Filter: DEA Pursues Vast Expansion of Patient Surveillance
Filter: DEA Pursues Vast Expansion of Patient Surveillance by Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard (“The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is looking to expand its anti-diversion surveillance infrastructure by being able to search and analyze myriad patient behaviors for the vast majority of … Continue reading
Vice: Police Are Tapping Into Ring Cameras to Expand Surveillance Network In Mississippi
Vice: Police Are Tapping Into Ring Cameras to Expand Surveillance Network In Mississippi by Edward Ongweso Jr (“The police department in Jackson, Mississippi is partnering with two companies to stream surveillance footage from Ring cameras in a 45-day pilot program.”)
CNET: Google is giving data to police based on search keywords, court docs show
CNET: Google is giving data to police based on search keywords, court docs show by Alfred Ng (“Court records in an arson case show that Google gave away data on people who searched for a specific address.”)
techdirt: DHS Probably Didn’t Clone Phones To Intercept Protesters’ Communications
techdirt: DHS Probably Didn’t Clone Phones To Intercept Protesters’ Communications by Tim Cushing:
Slate: It’s Time for a Reckoning About This Foundational Piece of Police Technology
Slate: It’s Time for a Reckoning About This Foundational Piece of Police Technology by Rashida Richardson and Amba Kak (“Criminal intelligence databases may seem unobjectionable in an era of facial recognition and predictive policing. But they are deeply flawed, too.”)