May 2026 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Archives
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Recent Posts
- OR: Even if original served warrant wasn’t the one returned, it doesn’t warrant suppression
- Two on suicide calls as exigency
- W.D.N.Y.: Civil discovery dispute denies access to other employees’ cell phones as 4A issue
- Reason: All New Cars Could Have Mandatory Surveillance Tech Unless Congress Stops This Mandate
- CA3: In seeking arrest warrants, officers need not present all exculpatory evidence to issuing magistrate unless it’s “conclusive”
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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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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)
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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
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NACDL’s Domestic Drone Information Center
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"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
Guardian: No, Clearview AI’s creepy plan to spy on us is not ‘free speech’
Guardian: No, Clearview AI’s creepy plan to spy on us is not ‘free speech’ by Jake Laperruque
Vox: The world’s scariest facial recognition software, explained
Vox: The world’s scariest facial recognition software, explained By Rebecca Heilweil (“Clearview AI built a massive database of faces that it’s making available to law enforcement, and nobody’s stopping it.”)
Reuters: Coronavirus brings China’s surveillance state out of the shadows
Reuters: Coronavirus brings China’s surveillance state out of the shadows by Yingzhi Yang & Julie Zhu (“When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his … Continue reading
The Atlantic: A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade
The Atlantic: A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade by Jonathan Kittrain (“As the growing scale of facial recognition shows, more data can always be extracted.”)
Slate: Clearview’s Terrifying Facial Recognition Can’t Go Back in the Bottle
Slate: Clearview’s Terrifying Facial Recognition Can’t Go Back in the Bottle by Aaron Mak (“Around half a dozen big tech companies have now demanded that Clearview AI, the now-notorious facial recognition company that has scraped more than 3 billion images … Continue reading
NYTimes: Opinion: The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans
NYTimes: Opinion: The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans (“Congressional hearings are urgently needed to address location tracking.”)
Law.com: Google Hit With Class Action Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law Over Facial Recognition
Law.com: Google Hit With Class Action Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law Over Facial Recognition by Ross Todd (“The complaint claims Google ‘failed to obtain consent from anyone’ when it introduced facial recognition to its cloud service for storing and sharing … Continue reading
gizmodo: Feds Find Fourth Amendment Workaround, Buy Phone Locations From Marketing Firms
gizmodo: Feds Find Fourth Amendment Workaround, Buy Phone Locations From Marketing Firms by Dell Cameron (“Sidestepping the need to obtain a search warrant, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reportedly been accessing phone location data belonging to millions of … Continue reading
Boston Globe: Editorial: Facial-recognition tech may have value, but real-time surveillance goes too far
Boston Globe: Editorial: Facial-recognition tech may have value, but real-time surveillance goes too far (“Software that identifies people in videos could create a privacy nightmare. A patchwork of city bans won’t prevent it.”)
Vox: Why we don’t know as much as we should about police surveillance technology
Vox: Why we don’t know as much as we should about police surveillance technology by Rebecca Heilweil (“Despite a growing number of high-tech tools, law enforcement agencies don’t seem to want to disclose what they’re using.”)
Chicago Sun Times: CPD using controversial facial recognition program that scans billions of photos from Facebook, other sites
Chicago Sun Times: CPD using controversial facial recognition program that scans billions of photos from Facebook, other sites by Tom Schuba (“Critics say Clearview AI’s software is an invasive overreach because it grabs the photos without the consent of those … Continue reading
Maneater: MU assessing new attendance-tracking app this semester
Maneater: MU assessing new attendance-tracking app this semester by Joy Mazur (“Students have raised privacy concerns over more advanced tracking methods.”): MU is now testing SpotterEDU, an app used to track attendance in classrooms. The pilot test taking place during … Continue reading
EFF: New Bill Would Make Needed Steps Toward Curbing Mass Surveillance
EFF: New Bill Would Make Needed Steps Toward Curbing Mass Surveillance by India McKinney & Andrew Crocker (“The Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act is a Strong Bill That Builds on Previous Surveillance Reforms”)
EFF: U.K. Police Will Soon be able to Search Through U.S. Data Without Asking a Judge
EFF: U.K. Police Will Soon be able to Search Through U.S. Data Without Asking a Judge by Joe Mullin:
WaPo: Perspective: Facebook will now show you exactly how it stalks you — even when you’re not using Facebook
WaPo: Perspective: Facebook will now show you exactly how it stalks you — even when you’re not using Facebook by Geoffrey A. Fowler (“The new ‘Off-Facebook Activity’ tool reminds us we’re living in a reality TV program where the cameras … Continue reading
The Intercept: The Rise of Smart Camera Networks, and Why We Should Ban Them
The Intercept: The Rise of Smart Camera Networks, and Why We Should Ban Them by Michael Kwet (“The rise of all-seeing smart camera networks is an alarming development that threatens civil rights and liberties throughout the world. Law enforcement agencies … Continue reading
WaPo: Editorial: A scary new facial recognition tool underlines the urgent need for privacy laws
WaPo: Editorial: A scary new facial recognition tool underlines the urgent need for privacy laws (“Privacy Doomsayers have always said the failure to regulate surveillance technology would result in the end of anonymity. But we didn’t realize doom might come … Continue reading
NYTimes: You Are Now Remotely Controlled
NYTimes: You Are Now Remotely Controlled (“Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.”):
NYTimes: Jeff Bezos’ Phone Hack Should Terrify Everyone
NYTimes: Jeff Bezos’ Phone Hack Should Terrify Everyone by Charlie Warzel (“Those with the most to lose don’t always safeguard their privacy very well. You can do better.”)
WaPo: Saudi crown prince implicated in hack of Jeff Bezos’s phone, U.N. report will say
WaPo: Saudi crown prince implicated in hack of Jeff Bezos’s phone, U.N. report will say by Marc Fisher and Steven Zeitchik (“A United Nations investigation to be released Wednesday will report that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s cellphone was hacked in … Continue reading