How Sotomayor undermined Obama’s NSA

[kpete]

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Sonia Sotomayor, June 4, 2010 in New York.

How Sotomayor undermined Obama’s NSA
12/23/13 09:45 AM—UPDATED 12/23/13 10:27 AM

By Adam Serwer

If Edward Snowden gave federal courts the means to declare the National Security Agency’s data-gathering unconstitutional, Sonia Sotomayor showed them how.

It was Sotomayor’s lonely concurrence in U.S. v Jones, a case involving warrantless use of a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car, that the George W. Bush-appointed Judge Richard Leon relied on when he ruled that the program was likely unconstitutional last week. It was that same concurrence the White House appointed review board on surveillance policy cited when it concluded government surveillance should be scaled back.

“It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” Sotomayor wrote in 2012. “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.”

Not a single other member of the high court signed onto Sotomayor’s concurrence; her three Democratic appointed colleagues sided with a narrower one written by Justice Samuel Alito. Though all nine justices agreed that police would likely need to get a warrant to place a GPS device on a suspect’s car, it was Sotomayor who was willing to argue that modern technology had essentially changed the meaning of what privacy means when so much of our personal information and history is preserved online, and can be easily collected by the government in mass quantities. When the Framers of the Constitution wrote of “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” they could not have imagined cloud storage or cell phone location tracking.


MORE:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-sotomayor-undermined-obamas-nsa

[appal_jack]

1. Absolutely. The gov't never extends rights to new technologies voluntarily.

Absolutely. The government (especially the executive branch, generally regardless of party) hardly ever recognizes rights extending to new technologies voluntarily. Sotomayor is right in her attempt to hold the executive branch in check here.

I just watched the second episode of Ken Burns' excellent Prohibition series last night, and the story was the same early in the 20th Century - the government tried to claim that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy when speaking over wires (i.e.- telephones). They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. Rights should endure across all technological advancements.

-app