> a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements, even if those movements are in public.
translates to actions on the public internet. This has potentially huge ramifications if it were to apply to the web, where the "totality of one's movements" can be much easier to track and perhaps even more revealing than where my car goes.
Can the FBI, by this standard, potentially need a search warrant to:
1. attempt to create a complete profile of my semi-public internet content (surreptitiously friend me on Facebook, follow my Twitter feed, and monitor all other sites where I am active for recent posts)
2. look at the browsing history of a public terminal I regularly use at a library
3. capture packets I'm sending over unencrypted WiFi in my home
None of these things are very much private nor does any involve any trespass by an investigator--perhaps 3 carries the greatest expectation of privacy by the average technically uninclined citizen. A lawyer could argue, however, that in capturing one or more of them, the FBI approaches capturing nearly all of what somebody does on the internet.
I think the Supreme Court has done a very interesting (and perhaps unprecedented?) thing here in creating an expectation of privacy in a public environment by invoking the work totality. With cameras getting smaller, and networks wider, and databases larger, it only seemed inevitable that within a few decades, all of our public movements within urban centres could and likely would be recorded. Similarly, people are already to starting to consider the internet to be "forever," since content never seems to be really "deletable," and Google/Facebook increasingly lower the effort needed to profile somebody's web content. Tell me that in a few decades, our movements on the internet will not be as important as our movements in the physical world, if that isn't already the case.
I hope this decision is the seed of a legal philosophy that could impede the continued erosion of privacy-in-public by everyone's smaller chips and bigger hard drives. In my mind, the freedom for people to interact in public without fear of lifelong ramifications is vital to democracy and societal progress although less and less people seem to agree with me. So, maybe this is my desperate optimism talking.
I think the point SC is trying to make is that while you're in public, FBI is free to follow you around all day long, thus tracking you in a way that you made publicly available.
However, bugging your car isn't something that you made explicitly available and therefore is violating your reasonable expectations of privacy.
That said, this indeed makes it very interesting in online play. It's obvious that FBI shouldn't just hack into your computer and watch your every move. But, if they just happened to observe your unencrypted data bits and make sense out of them, that might still be legal. After all, that's just like watching where your car goes to every day.
Actually, the opinion says that this case doesn't have anything to do with "reasonable expectations of privacy" like the government contended originally. The court says that this was actually trespass.
It's an interesting distinction, they made the decision not on Katz's "expectations of privacy" test, but instead on common-law trespass which the Fourth Amendment was based on. So this decision clarifies that the "expectations of privacy" test added to the Fourth Amendment's common-law origin, it didn't replace it.
> a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements, even if those movements are in public.
translates to actions on the public internet. This has potentially huge ramifications if it were to apply to the web, where the "totality of one's movements" can be much easier to track and perhaps even more revealing than where my car goes.
Can the FBI, by this standard, potentially need a search warrant to:
1. attempt to create a complete profile of my semi-public internet content (surreptitiously friend me on Facebook, follow my Twitter feed, and monitor all other sites where I am active for recent posts)
2. look at the browsing history of a public terminal I regularly use at a library
3. capture packets I'm sending over unencrypted WiFi in my home
None of these things are very much private nor does any involve any trespass by an investigator--perhaps 3 carries the greatest expectation of privacy by the average technically uninclined citizen. A lawyer could argue, however, that in capturing one or more of them, the FBI approaches capturing nearly all of what somebody does on the internet.
I think the Supreme Court has done a very interesting (and perhaps unprecedented?) thing here in creating an expectation of privacy in a public environment by invoking the work totality. With cameras getting smaller, and networks wider, and databases larger, it only seemed inevitable that within a few decades, all of our public movements within urban centres could and likely would be recorded. Similarly, people are already to starting to consider the internet to be "forever," since content never seems to be really "deletable," and Google/Facebook increasingly lower the effort needed to profile somebody's web content. Tell me that in a few decades, our movements on the internet will not be as important as our movements in the physical world, if that isn't already the case.
I hope this decision is the seed of a legal philosophy that could impede the continued erosion of privacy-in-public by everyone's smaller chips and bigger hard drives. In my mind, the freedom for people to interact in public without fear of lifelong ramifications is vital to democracy and societal progress although less and less people seem to agree with me. So, maybe this is my desperate optimism talking.