Orin Kerr writes: I haven’t blogged recently on judicial decisions considering the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment. As regular readers will recall, the “mosaic theory” is a term for the idea that long-term monitoring of a suspect can be a Fourth Amendment search even if short-term monitoring is not. Under this approach, which was suggested…
Category: U.S.
U.S. Weighs Wider Wiretap Laws to Cover Online Activity
Charlie Savage reports: The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. Read…
They’re Watching: FBI Business Records Requests Jump 900 Percent Compared to 2009
Robyn Greene writes: Last week served as yet another reminder of the threats posed to Americans’ privacy by the post-Patriot Act surveillance state. According to the Department of Justice’s annual report, FISA applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in 2012 revealed a continued increase in the FBI’s surveillance of Americans. The report covers…
EFF and ACLU Sue LA Law-Enforcement Agencies Over License-Plate Reader Records
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU-SC) today jointly filed suit against two Los Angeles-area law-enforcement agencies over their failure to produce records related to the use of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). Mounted on squad cars and telephone poles, these sophisticated camera systems read license plates…