Jay Stanley of the ACLU blogs:
I started working on privacy issues for the ACLU about five weeks before 9/11. What a wild ride it’s been for privacy since that terrible day. The privacy rights of Americans have come under a sustained assault that would have been hard to imagine in the languid days of August 2001. Since 9/11 we have seen two wars, a constant stream of revolutionary new technologies, greatly expanded powers for our security agencies, and a relentless political drumbeat pounding on the supposed need to give those agencies even more powers to peer into our lives without due process or meaningful oversight.
Underlying all this, however, is a looming problem that has little to do with 9/11: the fact that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has gone badly off track. With all the privacy battles I’ve been involved in over the last nine years, that constitutional problem has always hung over us, often underlying or worsening more particular privacy issues such as data mining or financial privacy.
Now, I’ve written a paper for the American Constitution Society on this: Crisis in Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence.
Read more on the ACLU blog. Unfortunately, access to the article seems to require a password.