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- CO: Not 4A or state constitutional violation for govt to access def’s computer via peer-to-peer sharing with BitTorrent software
- WSJ: ‘We Know You Live Right Here’: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet
- NY Columbia Co.: Alleged excessive nervousness when multiple police cars arrive at a traffic stop doesn’t add to RS
- CA4: Backpack dumped in flight in grandmother’s yard was abandoned
- GA: Virtually all-inclusive list of items to be seized wasn’t overbroad
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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 -
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To search Search and Seizure on Lexis.com $ -
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General (many free):
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FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (2008) (pdf)
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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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"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
the intercept: Leaked Catalogue Reveals a Vast Array of Military Spy Gear Offered to U.S. Police
the intercept: Leaked Catalogue Reveals a Vast Array of Military Spy Gear Offered to U.S. Police by Sam Biddle: A confidential, 120-page catalogue of spy equipment, originating from British defense firm Cobham and circulated to U.S. law enforcement, touts gear … Continue reading
Wired: How Baltimore Became America’s Laboratory for Spy Tech
Wired: How Baltimore Became America’s Laboratory for Spy Tech by Lily Hay Newman: If you live in Baltimore, you may have the feeling that you’re being watched. You are. Baltimore Police track your cellphone use without a warrant. They secretly … Continue reading
fivethirtyeight.com: Internet Tracking Has Moved Beyond Cookies
fivethirtyeight.com: Internet Tracking Has Moved Beyond Cookies by Jody Avirgan:
CIO Dive: What happens when tech innovation moves faster than Congress?
CIO Dive: What happens when tech innovation moves faster than Congress? by Justine Brown: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) has a provision that requires electronic communications more than 180 days old be treated as abandoned and thus obtainable with … Continue reading
New American: New Illinois Law Nullifies Expansion of Surveillance State
New American: New Illinois Law Nullifies Expansion of Surveillance State by Joe Wolverton, II: A new law in Illinois works to protect citizens of that state from being subjected to electronic surveillance that violates their right to be free from … Continue reading
New Law Review Article: Protecting the Fourth Amendment in the Information Age: A Response to Robert Litt
New Law Review Article: Protecting the Fourth Amendment in the Information Age: A Response to Robert Litt by Cindy Cohn (short form here without footnotes)
Fusion: Police asked this 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man’s fingers to unlock his phone
Fusion: Police asked this 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man’s fingers to unlock his phone by Rose Eveleth: So instead of asking the company that made the phone to grant them access, they’re going another route: having the … Continue reading
WaPo: Communications network providers opposed government surveillance — in 1928
WaPo: Volokh Conspiracy: Communications network providers opposed government surveillance — in 1928 by Orin Kerr: A lot of readers are familiar with Olmstead v. United States, the 1928 Supreme Court case ruling that wiretapping a telephone line is not a … Continue reading
NYTimes: Technology Doesn’t Change the Need for Legal Protection
NYTimes: Technology Doesn’t Change the Need for Legal Protection by Kami N. Chavis: Technology is playing a greater role in law enforcement — from robots to “predictive policing” software to “shot spotter” technology — and it can increase efficiency in … Continue reading
GAO: Face Recognition Technology: FBI Should Better Ensure Privacy and Accuracy
GAO: Face Recognition Technology: FBI Should Better Ensure Privacy and Accuracy:
The Hill: NSA: We couldn’t have hacked the San Bernadino iPhone
The Hill: NSA: We couldn’t have hacked the San Bernadino iPhone by Joe Uchill: “We don’t do every phone, every variation of phone,” said an agency deputy director.
Boston NPR: GPS Is Everywhere, Is That A Good Thing?
Boston NPR: GPS Is Everywhere, Is That A Good Thing? Here and Now, “Jeremy Hobson talks with Greg Milner about some of the security concerns that have come up involving GPS.”
Center for Democracy and Technology: Issue Brief: Proposed Changes to Rule 41
Center for Democracy and Technology: Issue Brief: Proposed Changes to Rule 41: The Rule Change: Under the old Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, magistrates with authority in a district may only issue warrants for search and … Continue reading
The Intercept: FBI Chooses Secrecy Over Locking Up Criminals
The Intercept: FBI Chooses Secrecy Over Locking Up Criminals by Jenna McLaughlin: The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to discuss even the broad strokes of some of its secret investigative methods, such as implanting malware and tracking cellphones with Stingrays, … Continue reading
The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age by Robert S. Litt, Yale L.J.
The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age by Robert S. Litt, 126 Yale L.J. __:
D.Mass.: NIT warrant in CP investigation that transmitted information to user’s computers violated USMJ statute and Rule 41 and no GFE
In a child porn investigation, the government took over a server with child porn known as “Website A.” “The government used a “Network Investigative Technique (“NIT”) [warrant] that would allow the government covertly to transmit computer code to Website A … Continue reading
The Atlantic: How License-Plate Readers Have Helped Police and Lenders Target the Poor
The Atlantic: How License-Plate Readers Have Helped Police and Lenders Target the Poor by Kevah Waddell: Law enforcement can access privately-collected location information about cars—and some low-income neighborhoods have faced extra scrutiny.
Newsweek: How the FBI Uses Facial Recognition Technology to Fight Crime
Newsweek: How the FBI Uses Facial Recognition Technology to Fight Crime by Eric Markowitz: Today, the FBI’s digital catalog of searchable ‘face photos’ has ballooned to some 548 million pictures, the largest database of faces in history. It includes criminal … Continue reading
NYTimes: F.B.I. Director Suggests Bill for iPhone Hacking Topped $1.3 Million
NYTimes: F.B.I. Director Suggests Bill for iPhone Hacking Topped $1.3 Million by Eric Lichtblau and Katie Benner: The director of the F.B.I. suggested Thursday that his agency paid at least $1.3 million to an undisclosed group to help hack into … Continue reading
WSJ: Prosecutors Say Fitbit Device Exposed Fibbing in Rape Case
WSJ: Prosecutors Say Fitbit Device Exposed Fibbing in Rape Case by Jacob Gershman: Data has always been a double-edged sword. The convenience, efficiency and knowledge on one side and privacy fears, surveillance concerns and cybercrime on the other. The same … Continue reading