Justice Sotomayor Totally Called It: Fourth Amendment vs Domestic Spying

In January 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling regarding warrantless GPS surveillance. Read the full opinion of U.S. v. Jones here.  I blogged about it the day the ruling came out, here.


At the time, I thought the most interesting part was this excerpt from Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in which she wrote:

I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on....More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties....This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers.  Perhaps, as Justice Alito notes, some people may find the “tradeoff ” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.

(emphasis added).

After this summer's disclosures about the NSA's domestic spying, Justice Sotomayor's words in 2012 were eerily prescient.


Julie

Copyright 2013 Julie Ann Sombathy All Rights Reserved

Weird Judgments

In last week's story, found here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ) I told you about an old divorce decree from 1940's Virginia. When we received a copy of it, I was blown away by some of the recitals it contained.

Any judgment will contain a few "recitals."  Recitals are statements of procedural matters, and sometimes contain findings by the court that are required for the judgment to be entered.  

The divorce decree between Faye's parents contained a recital that both the husband and wife were of the Caucasian race.  When I first read it, I did a straight double take.  Then I remembered that back when Faye's parents were married, the law in the state of Virginia  prohibited marriage between a black person and a white person. This was referred to as the crime of miscegenation.   

The law was challenged, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in 1967.  

There's this weird thing that happens in cases:  many times, case names strangely reflect the underlying facts. The case in which the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia marriage law is Loving v. Virginia, which is kind of awesome,  isn't it? 

My Website

Copyright 2013 Julie Ann Sombathy All Rights Reserved