“ Courts across the country have been unclear about what privacy rights apply to e-mail and texting, which are fast eclipsing postal mail and conventional telephones. The Supreme Court should make clear that the Fourth Amendment’s robust privacy protections apply just as robustly to 21st-century communication.”
The Supreme Court, Texting and Privacy - NYT
I was particularly interested in the oral arguments for Ontario v. Quon, not just to see how the Court applies search standards to the fact pattern, but also to see how the Court would handle the technology focused discussion.
After the Court heard arguments, there was a lot of press about how Chief Justice Roberts was a disconnected Luddite (“Maybe — maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail?”), but after reading the transcript, I found myself agreeing with this piece in The Weekly Standard that shows Roberts was just clarifying things for the record.
Many privacy advocates have been pushing the Court in Quon to adopt data minimization practices in order to ensure workplace privacy, even for government employees. Reading the transcript, it does not look like the Court will recognize such a right.
Now, with the iPhone lost & found, search & seizure case, it looks like legal interpretations of electronic privacy and reasonable search procedure is in the news again.
It leaves me wondering— in the future, will we always think Justices are old-fashioned and don’t understand technology? If the next generation of Justices grow up in the era of social networking, will they be more likely to recognize privacy rights, or will they just believe that everything should be transparent and public?
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