At the ACS Blog, Jeremy Leaming: The Government's 'General Warrants' for the Digital Age (plus video interview with Jameel Jaffer, ACLU Deputy Legal Director):
If the Fourth Amendment bar against unreasonable searches and seizures undertaken by the government “prohibits anything, it surely is that kind of dragnet surveillance that’s not based on individualized suspicion of any kind,” Jaffer said. “In fact, the whole point of the Fourth Amendment was to prohibit general warrants; warrants that were not particularized, that were not based on individualized suspicion. And I think it is fair to say that what we are looking at now is general warrants for the digital age — that is what the government is proposing and defending here.”
For related thoughts, see this earlier post by Mike Rappaport (discussing a WSJ article by Randy Barnett). As the post puts it, the difficulty is whether the surveillance constitutes either a "search" or "seizure."
ALSO RELATED: At Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr discusses the recent decision by the Fifth Circuit on cell-site data.
Posted at 9:07 AM