The crooks who created modern wiretapping law

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/the-crooks-who-created-modern-wiretapping-law.ars

by ihodes • 15 years ago

51 1 15 years ago

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

Justice Potter Stewart explained in 1967:

"The Government stresses the fact that the telephone booth from which the petitioner made his calls was constructed partly of glass, so that he was as visible after he entered it as he would have been if he had remained outside. But what he sought to exclude when he entered the booth was not the intruding eye—it was the uninvited ear. He did not shed his right to do so simply because he made his calls from a place where he might be seen. No less than an individual in a business office, in a friend's apartment, or in a taxicab, a person in a telephone booth may rely upon the protection of the Fourth Amendment. One who occupies it, shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world. To read the Constitution more narrowly is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in private communication."

Replace telephone with Internet, it's the same scenario as today. Except instead of stretching the 4th amendment, they've stretched probable cause.

The crooks who created modern wiretapping law

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