Fourth Amendment Privacy

The past several years have seen a proliferation of legislation directed at controlling criminal activities through the increased application of new laws. The effectiveness of these new laws, remains in question due not only to their relative infancy but also due to a uniform determinism of what constitutes effectiveness. The purpose of this paper will be to review the Fourth amendment particularly relating to NSA, FISA, Title III and the PATRIOT Act.

Technology has become very effective for a thriving generation, but it also possesses a handful of flaws that counter the benefits. Technologies help people post and deliver a message in a matter of seconds in order to get a message spread quickly. It also gives individuals the power to be the person they want to be by only showing one side of themselves. But sometimes information that had intentions of remaining protected gets out. That information is now open for all human eyes to see. This information, quite frankly, becomes everybody’s information and can be bought and sold without the individual being aware of it at all. However, this is no accident. Americans in the post 9/11 era have grown accustomed to being monitored. Government entities such as the NSA and laws such as the Patriot Act have received power to do so in order to protect security of Americans. However, the founding fathers wrote the fourth amendment to protect against violations of individual’s privacy without reason. In a rapidly growing technological world, civil liberties are increasingly being violated by privacy wiretapping from government entities such as the NSA, Patriot Act and the reduction of the Fourth Amendment.

The 4th amendment to the US Constitution serve as a security to the privacy of citizen but as American citizen would rarely have the government to use the surveillance to ensure the nation security from terrorist threat. People use the internet, phones, and cameras to record information. The government do wire taps and now even in the City of Atlanta we have camera on light poles and on the streets in downtown but it is for a good reason to help protect the people that work, live and walk the streets this also help the police where that they are short of help. I think the government has stop more attacks on the country using the surveillance since 9/11 incident. I believed if this will help protect us then the government

The Fourth Amendment provides citizen the freedom of privacy. The expectation of privacy is covered under the Fourth Amendment in order to protect this privacy. I strongly believe that an officer should obtain a search warrant in order to violate one's right to privacy when crossing the boundary of personal items. By searching an individual backpack, purse or wallet, one's privacy is invaded. According to the court in People v. Cregan personal items such as cigarette packs (found in pockets), wallets, or purses may be searched due to these items being inaccessibility of the individual at the time of an arrest. This ruling allows officers to violate one's privacy by searching these items; even though, the items are personal to the individual.

Three amendments have been perceived as being violated once the Patriot Act was put into place. When the Patriot Act was put into place the First Amendment was indirectly violated, due to the fact that an individual could be surveillance basic on their First Amendment actions. Although the government is not restricting the liberties stated,

The National Security Agency’s (NSA) warrantless collection of metadata has been questioned on constitutional grounds. Specifically, the NSA’s program has been argued to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which states that all citizens are to be free from any unreasonable search or seizure. Proponents of the NSA’s collection of metadata believe that it is a crucial tool in preventing terrorist attacks, while opponents of the program believe that its questionable constitutional validity, along with its lack of clear success in preventing a single terrorist attack, leaves the NSA’s metadata collection program in desperate need of reform or outright abolishment.

The Fourth Amendment was purposeful to create a good constitutional relationship between U.S. citizens and frighten power of law enforcement. This Amendment has mainly three components. Firstly, its main intension is to maintain privacy by recognizing the rights of U.S. citizens to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Secondly

Upon doing a little research about dogs and how they are used within the law legally can be controversial, but dogs using their noses is actually a very key tool.

Protecting American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures is the central idea of the Fourth Amendment; however, the Fourth Amendment may also apply to electronics. Classified organizations, such as, the NSA secretly collect information that includes, details of phone calls, e-mails, and personal Internet activity, although, in 2013 the NSA’s secret was revealed to the public, since it was not publicly known that the NSA had been collecting bulk phone data. The NSA later tried to defend itself and state that it doesn’t mean that they collect all personal records, such as, medical records and library records. In order for the NSA to legally store phone data the agency must first receive a warrant from the FISA Court each time it wants

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution emphatically states that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause (Legal Information Institute 1.1).” Although the Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of people, today’s technology has led to privacy issues that need to be addressed. For example, when people comment on Twitter, it and a few other digital companies keep all the comments a person has ever posted (Daniel Zwerdling 1.2). Similarly, warrants must be used at all times if people are seizing information from someone, but searching through metadata does not require a warrant and there is no cause. Another issue is camera surveillance, which captures people who have not committed a crime, and security people do not need a warrant to

The Bill of Rights contain protections that are extremely vital to all Americans. The Fourth Amendment, which includes several protections, has one main objective — to protect the privacy of individuals from government intrusions (Davies, 1999). There have been a plethora of cases alleging Fourth Amendment violations. When rendering decisions on Supreme Court cases, the court uses the Warrant Approach, the Reasonableness Approach, and the Special Needs Doctrine as guides (Davies, 1999).

Because in order to gain access to these records, a court order must be issued; to gain a court order, there must be sufficient evidence that the records they are after are related to a crime. However, this is not always done through the right procedure in today’s computer age and lately all that is needed to gain information is a subpoena, which is as Bankston from the Center of Democracy and Technology states, “trivially easy to issue.” (Washington Post). This is because that instead of proving that the records requested are related to a crime, they need only prove that they are relevant to an investigation. The NSA interprets the meaning of relevancy rather loosely and often circumvents the normal channels and are instead, as Barton Gellman states, “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs”(Washington Post). They are accessing the information they want directly through the companies that hold the information and through this program PRISM, the GCHQ; the British version of the NSA has been able to do the same. This means that the program designed to collect the records of Americans, is able to be accessed by other countries, further invading the privacy of American citizens. However, the government’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment does not only involve the accessing of personal records and has been used to conduct the search and seizure of property without a

The search and seizure stipulate that the Fourth Amendment is about privacy. It gives a prevision of protection of personal privacy to every citizen’s right, not to serve as a fixed protection against the misuse of the government, but to be free from unreasonable government intrusion into individuals lives. There is an understanding that one must know when looking into the Fourth Amendment and expecting protection, that must be considered. It serves as a protection for the rights of the people during police stops, arrests, searches and seizures of homes, papers and businesses. It has been placed to be a legal mechanical device to ensure that people’s rights are treated fairly under limited circumstances from those who are in a legal position. The Fourth Amendment stretches out to demonstrate the protection of search and seizure. This constitutional protection is provided to individuals in many scenarios. When police have a valid search warrant, a valid arrest warrant or the belief that probable cause in which a crime has been committed it shows that law enforcement has validation or at least a solid belief of probable cause during a search or seizure, but just so you understand the police can override your privacy, your concerns and conduct a search of you and your personal space. Law is a concrete form of rules that has been placed in a foundation that was established for policy holders to refer back to encase there is a need for an exclusionary rule (Nd 2014). During my

The Fourth Amendment was added on December 15, 1791, and ensured that it would protect citizens from arbitrary invasions, unlawful detainments, and a citizen’s right to privacy in the United States. Throughout modern America, the Fourth would should up in various landmark court cases around the country and establish itself as one of the most fundamental rights a person can possess. Citizens have the right to feel safe in their homes, as well as being safe around their own town, but what would happen if you were not at your residence and police wanted to search your home? This can be seen in the court case Weeks v. United States.

The Fourth Amendment is about search and seizure. This amendment is mostly about having one’s own privacy. The amendment has been implemented to protect against unlawful searches and seizure by the federal law enforcement and also by the state. The Fourth Amendment protects the U.S citizen’s right of privacy from invasion. Today, the topic of privacy is frequently and heatedly discussed. As a person who wants to be aware of my rights, I and also the U.S. citizens need to know this amendment better, to know the histories of the amendment, the evolvements of its interpretation and how it plays the role in Supreme Court.