We’ve Got Your Number

[pscot]

Ms. Greenhouse is a must for Court followers. This is a long article and it seemed appropriate to use her entire lead.

Linda Greenhouse

A generation ago, the Supreme Court was faced with deciding whether the police needed a warrant before installing a newfangled device at a telephone company switching office that could record the numbers dialed from a particular telephone. The answer the court gave was no.

After all, Justice Harry A. Blackmun explained in his majority opinion, people know that the telephone company keeps track of the numbers they call -- they see their long-distance calls listed on their monthly bill. “It is too much to believe,” he wrote, “that telephone subscribers, under these circumstances, harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret.” The absence of a “legitimate expectation of privacy” in information voluntarily conveyed to the phone company, the court concluded, meant that the use of the device, a “pen register,” was not even a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches. Hence, no warrant was required.

This case, Smith v. Maryland, was no big deal in its day. (And the defendant in the garden-variety case that led to the decision was no criminal mastermind -- he was making harassing calls from his home phone.) The majority opinion was only 11 pages long. There were three dissenting votes, but the dissenting opinions lacked passion. After Justice Blackmun circulated his final draft in June 1979, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger responded by agreeing that “the urge for privacy does not rise to the level of a constitutionally protected right.” The chief justice added that “Congress could require a warrant but the Constitution does not.”

He ended his note with a lighthearted P.S.: “I’m going to use a public phone for my calls to my bookie.”

Thirty-five years later, telephones and their users’ privacy concerns are obviously no joking matter. They are the question of the hour. Constitutional challenges to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone data collection produced opposing Federal District Court rulings last month, and the issue appears destined for the Supreme Court.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/opinion/greenhouse-weve-got-your-number.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion®ion=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=Blogs

[Thinkingabout]

1. As I have heard many times in recent months on DU, if someone knows a crime is happening

or has happened our information should be revealed. For a long time wiretapping has happened and will probably continue, will it be in the form we have known in the past, depends on the technology. Evidence will be gathered and everyone must know where ever they put themselves there is DNA which can be collected. There are ways to detect whether it is our voices on a recording. There are cameras everywhere, when we go to the ATM machines, when we walk in and out of places of businesses, and many are installing cameras which shows what is happening in our personal homes. There is more technology coming, there are social networks and different forms of communications. What we all have to remember is our "privacy" may not follow the rules of 1800, if you say or do anything it can be recorded. If you do not want this information recorded then you have to remain secluded, it is your choice.