Category Archives: Fourth Amendment

The Home School Legal Defense Association, the nations premiere advocate for homeschooling, is representing a family in its suit against a police officers unauthorized entry into a private home, even though the case has nothing to do with homeschooling.

Its because the case brought by LuAnn, Joseph and Timothy Batt against police officer Joseph Buccilli, who forced his way into the familys home without either a warrant or an emergency reason, illustrates the battle for the front door.

The family is appealing to the the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing the Fourth Amendment protects them from unreasonable searches.

The amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The case is relevant to homeschoolers, HSDLA explains, because early homeschoolers sometimesfound an investigative social worker at their front door, often accompanied by uniformed police officers.

These authorities were typically investigating anonymous tips that didnt have much to do with homeschooling itself often something like this: The children are always home, they dont go to school, and the family seems really religious.'

Police State USA: How Orwells Nightmare Is Becoming Our Reality chronicles how America has arrived at the point of being a de facto police state and what led to an out-of-control government that increasingly ignores the Constitution. Order today!

HSLDA said homeschoolers soon learned that front-door encounters with an investigative social worker could be traumatic for both parents and children alike.

Protecting our member families from such unwarranted investigations was what drew HSLDA into what we call the battle for the front door defending Fourth Amendment rights, the organizationsaid.

In the New York case, Buccilli, a police officerin Orchard City, barged into the familys home without a warrant after being told he had no permission to enter.

He claimed social services had asked him to do a welfare check at the home.

According to an HSLDA brief to the 2nd Circuit, which asks that the lower courts decision to award Buccilli immunity in the case be overturned, the officeradmitted he knew nothing about any allegations of wrongdoingor any emergencyand didnt know who asked for the welfare check.

I dont know the basis of the allegations or what the welfare concerns are, he told the family. We do have a right to come in here when an allegation is made.

I dont need a search warrant. I dont need to ask permission, he continued.

And, multiple times, he threatened anyone who obstructed him with arrest.

He ended up talking to a senior citizen, LuAnn Batts father, Fred Puntoriero, who was well-dressed and well-groomed and was being cared for by a nurse, and left. Social services closed down its investigation almost immediately.

But the lawsuit against the officer argueshe did exactly what the Constitution, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, forbids.

Entries without a warrant are allowed for several reasons: when an officer is in hot pursuit of a suspect, when evidence is in imminent danger of being destroyed or someone is in need of emergency aid.

The brief points outnone of those circumstances existed for Buccilli.

Pointedly, the brief states, In 2004, the Supreme Court said no reasonable officer could claim to be unaware of the basic rule, well established by our cases, that absent consent or exigency, a warrantless search of the home is presumptively unconstitutional.

It turns out, the brief explains, that Puntorieros daughter-in-law, who had been involved in disputes with the family over Freds care and property, had called authorities with the complaint that two weeks earlier her husband had expressed concern over his fathers welfare.

However, when Fred livedwith her and her husband, he was diagnosed with failure to thrive.

She told adult protective services that her husband had said two weeks earlier that Fred was lethargic when he visited.

APS admitted such reports from an underlying family dispute often are false, but the officer charged into the home anyway.

On April 17, 2012, Lt. Buccilli forcibly entered the Batts home, without consent or a warrant, to conduct a welfare check. On that day, federal law prohibited police from forcibly entering a home without consent or a warrant for any reason whatsoever, unless the circumstances fell within one of the established narrowly-drawn exigency exceptions, the brief explains.

The circumstances Lt. Buccilli confronted presented no exigency whatsoever.

HSLDAs Darren Jones, a litigation attorney, said theFourth Amendment doesnt have an exception based on a welfare check.'

Before police can come into a home, they must have either a warrant or some clearly defined exception, like an emergency or a hot pursuit of a suspect, he explained.

HSLDA Senior Counsel James R. Mason previously notedthe Batts were members of HSLDA since their son was a child.

He grew up reading about his Fourth Amendment rights in The Home School Court Report.

Mason pointed out Buccilli even threatened the family with informing adult protect services about [your] lack of cooperation.

The officerthen said, You should not pretend to know the law.

Mason argued the Fourth Amendment does not permit the police to enter anyones home without a warrant unless there is a real emergency even if its called a welfare check.'

The report said HSLDA has long believed that it is important to dispel the notion among police and other authorities that all Fourth Amendment bets are off when they demand to enter a home to conduct a welfare check.'

Police State USA: How Orwells Nightmare Is Becoming Our Reality chronicles how America has arrived at the point of being a de facto police state and what led to an out-of-control government that increasingly ignores the Constitution. Order today!

Link:
Homeschoolers ramp up 4th Amendment battle - WND.com

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Fourteen of the biggest US tech companies filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Monday supporting more rigorous warrant requirements for law enforcement seeking certain cell phone data, such as location information. In the statement, the signatoriesGoogle, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft among themargue that the government leans on outdated laws from the 1970s to justify Fourth Amendment overreach. One perhaps surprising voice in the chorus of protesters? Verizon.

Verizon's support means that the largest wireless service provider in the US, and a powerful force in Silicon Valley, has bucked a longtime trend of telecom acquiescence. While carriers have generally been willing to comply with a broad range of government requestseven building out extensive infrastructure to aid surveillanceVerizon has this time joined with academics, analysts, and the companys more privacy-focused corporate peers.

Carpenter v. United States is one of the most important Fourth Amendment cases in recent memory, Craig Silliman, Verizons executive vice president for public policy and general counsel, wrote on Monday. Although the specific issue presented to the Court is about location information, the case presents a broader issue about a customers reasonable expectation of privacy for other types of sensitive data she shares with any third party. Our hope is that when it decides this case, the Court will help us better apply old Fourth Amendment doctrines to an evolving digital era.

From the early days of landlines, telecoms have complied with law enforcement requests for customer data such as call length, location, and who has called whom. As the variety of data customers generate has exponentially expanded and evolved, so has this information gathering by government officials, often under a general mandate and without a case-specific warrant. For its part, Verizon cooperated with the National Security Agency as part of broad bulk surveillance programs for years. Details of this coordination was revealed in NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, but some aspects of it had been publicly debated for years prior.

Carpenter v. United States, which the Supreme Court will hear this fall, relates to the acquisition, without a warrant, of months of individuals location records by law enforcement officials in 2011. Officials looked back on 12,898 location records, spanning a four-month period, of one of these individuals, Timothy Carpenter, to build their case; Carpenter was eventually convicted. His appeal argues that location-data collection by law enforcement without a warrant violates his Fourth Amendment rightsand Verizon agrees.

Verizon stands out because they actually hold the specific kind of location records that are directly at issue, says Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Carpenter. The telecoms have a long history in general of cooperating with law enforcement surveillance demands, but I think Verizons participation reflects a growing understanding of the importance of standing up for customers privacy rights."

As the general public becomes increasingly aware of the privacy risks associated with entrusting their data to corporate entities, a strong stance on data protection has been a boon to companies like Apple. This economic incentive may be even stronger for the numerous telecoms that now straddle the line between traditional utility and tech company. Verizon, for example, now owns Yahoo and AOL in addition to its role as a top-four wireless provider in the US.

"At the end of the day, a company like Verizon isnt going to stick its neck out if it doesnt think that theres a business rationale in addition to it being the right thing to do," Wessler says.

Verizon has laid the groundwork for this move for months. Silliman wrote publicly last year about potential Fourth Amendment concerns when telecoms comply with warrantless law enforcement data requests. The company's stand won't necessarily prompt peers to followno other telecoms joined this particular briefbut it still represents a turning point in the dialog between privacy advocates and monolithic telecoms. And in Carpenter v. United States, it's only one of the voices that matters in the larger discussion about data privacy.

"The other tech companies bring the perspective that this case is also about our emails and our smart devices and all the kinds of cloud-stored data that we create in the course of our daily lives now," Wessler says. "The Justices should not be under the misapprehension that they can just try to narrowly apply these outdated precedents from the 1970s in this case. The implications are really huge, and this is the chance to make sure that our understanding of the Fourth Amendment keeps up with digital technology.

Read the rest here:
VerizonYes, VerizonJust Stood Up For Your Privacy - WIRED

Location data from your phone may fall under the protection of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and advocates from various circles, including the tech world, are making the argument that this should be the case. The conversation was started by a court case known as Carter v. the United States, wherein the court is seeking the right to obtain rough location data to track the defendant over the course of 127 days. Carter is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. The movement includes representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Verizon, and a panel of experts from around the tech sphere. The base argument is that obtaining data constitutes seizure, while interpreting the data constitutes search, two activities that are restricted by the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment protects from unreasonable examples of those activities, and establishes the requirement for law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before performing most types of search and seizure procedures.

The type of location data thats presently at the center of the conversation is the somewhat less precise location data that can be gleaned from any device connected to a cellular network, with or without the involvement of GPS. This data includes a triangulation of your current location from nearby cell towers, as well as the locations of nearby Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi networks, if available. This data tends to be less precise than GPS data, with an average accuracy of a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters, depending on network conditions. Thanks to the deployment of a larger amount of towers and small cells and more sophisticated network equipment, as well as a larger amount of mobile, IoT, and other electronic devices around at any given time, this location data has been less prone to gross inaccuracy in recent years.

The location data in question has, in the past, been considered imprecise enough to not warrant it being categorized as personal or private data. Police have used such data on a fairly routine basis for more rough usages, such as obtaining evidence of an alibi or a lack of one, putting multiple defendants near the scene of a crime at the same time, and doing other investigative tasks. Having such data require a warrant going forward could make investigations costlier and slower, which in turn means that the privacy and security advocates trying to push for this change will have an uphill battle ahead of them.

Read more from the original source:
4th Amendment Protections Sought For Cell Site Location Data - Android Headlines

Press Release | August 14, 2017

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of 19 other media organizations support requiring the government to obtain warrants for access to cellphone location records

The government should not be able to obtain cellphone location records without first getting a warrant, said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The current ruling makes it too easy for the government to track a persons every move through their cellphone, which is especially worrisome if the location records in question belong to a journalist. This endangers journalists ability to gather information and keep the public informed without the risk of being easily and routinely surveilled.

The coalition brief argues that cellphone location records paint an intimate and comprehensive picture of where individuals go, and thus the people and places they associate with.

According to the brief, a journalists cellphone location data can disclose particularly sensitive details about the journalistic process: It can reveal the stories a journalist is working on before they are published, where a journalist went to gather information for those stories, and the identity of a journalists sourcesExposure of sources and journalistic methods can put sources jobs and lives at risk, compromise the integrity of the newsgathering process, and have a chilling effect on reporting.

The brief also argues that if the government can easily and routinely access detailed information about a persons movements without a warrant, it threatens the ability to freely engage in activities protected by the First Amendment like newsgathering, which now often relies on use of a cellphone.

Cellphones have become a mobile newsroom and a necessary newsgathering tool for journalists. Unfortunately, theres no way to use a cellphone without sharing some location data with a service provider, said Brown. Allowing the government to easily access cellphone location records that paint a picture of where a journalist goes and possibly even who they meet with chills reporter-source relationships, threatens newsgathering, and ultimately harms the flow of information to the public.

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Fourth Amendment protects against warrantless seizure of cellphone location records, amicus brief argues - Reporters Committee for Freedom of the...

Apple, Facebook, Google and other major technology companies asked the Supreme Court late on Monday night to rule that their users data should be protected from warantless search and seizure by the government.

The companies filed a brief in the case Carpenter v. United States, which the court has taken up to decide whether certain cell phone data is protected under the Fourth Amendment.

The namesake of the case is Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted of a string of armed robberies in 2010 and 2011. At trial, prosecutors presented cell phone location data from Carpenter and his accomplices that was obtained from service providers without a warrant.

The companies, which stressed that they took no position on Carpenters guilt, argued that their customers understand that data is collected by service providers as part of providing digital technologies, customers still expect privacy with respect to other parties, including the government.

Twitter, Verizon, Microsoft and Snap are also among the companies that filed.

View post:
Google, Facebook ask Supreme Court to protect cell phone data under Fourth Amendment - The Hill

Most people know that very little they do on the web is private. The terabytes of data held online contain personal information accessible not only to friends, relatives and would-be employers, but to private businesses, which frequently collect user information in order to deliver better services to customers.

Can the government see it too?

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Marylandthat Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches do not cover such third party access to online data. In what has since been developed as the Third Party Doctrine, the court ruled that an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy for information voluntarily given to athird partybe it a person, bank, or phone carrierinformation that is also then similarly available to government agencies.

But what are government agencies, such as law enforcement, constitutionally permitted to do with the data they collect? A case before the Court next month may help answer the question.

Carpenter v. United States has the potential to affect application of the Fourth Amendments Third Party Doctrine in the digital age.

The case involves a string of robberies, allegedly organized by the defendant, Timothy Carpenter, which occurred over a two-year period. Police acquired cell site location information (CSLI) associated with the phone he used. Although no search warrant was ever obtained, a judge did sign a court order under the Stored Communications Act, a statute that requires reasonable suspicion, not probable cause.

The CSLI records revealed Carpenters location and movements over 127 days and showed that during the five-month period his phone was in communication with cell towers near the crime scenes.

Although there is a tendency to read Smith v. Maryland as a blanket rule, where anything given to or accessed by a third party has no Fourth Amendment interest, it doesnt make sense to apply a doctrine created over 30 years ago to types of communications and data that were neither used at the time nor contemplated by the Court.

Deanna Paul

Given how much [of] our data goes through third parties, if you take a strong reading of the Doctrine, it essentially wipes out Fourth Amendment protections for most modern communications, Michael Price, Senior Counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at New York Universitys Brennan Center for Justice, told me.

There is also nothing about location information in Smith. To rely on it, and say that location information should be accessible without a warrant, is reading the case far too broadly.

Prices point is an important one.

To analogize cases is to suggest they should be treated the same under the law and receive the same level of protection. Although the facts may specifically involve cell-site information, Carpenter is about more than just location privacy. Here, as is increasingly the case with Internet-of-Things-based prosecutions, a third-party server already had access to the sought after location data.

Carpenter presents the first chance for the Court to reconsider Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches and seizures of information generated and collected by the many modern technologies we use every day.

This is an opportunity at least one Supreme Court Justice has recognized.

In 2012, the Court resolved the issue of location privacy in United States v. Jones, holding that installation of a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device on a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicles movements constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. In her concurrence, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the current approach to these cases 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

She suggested it may need to be rethought in the future.

There are signs from recent cases, like Jones, that the Justices are aware of the importance of technology in contemporary life. They appear to recognize that technology is significantly different today than it was ten years ago, let alone when the Court was deciding cases like Smith.

Riley v. California was the first time the Supreme Court identified the central role that cellphones have in todays society, holding that police need a warrant to search a smart phone belonging to a person who has been arrested. Writing for the majority in 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts said that cell phones have such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.

The Riley Court went on to say that cellular phones have become essential to freedom of speech and First Amendment rights and, due to the volume and personal nature of the information that can be stored on a cellphone, the data should be presumptively protected by the First Amendment. The decision notes that a cell phone can double as a diary, camera, calendar, or newspaper, which makes the search of one fundamentally different from a physical search or even a search of business records.

This is an important decision, in terms of First Amendment protections, showcasing the Supreme Courts comfort with new technology and that it is cognizant of the impact of digital information, said Andrew Ferguson of the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of District Columbia, and a national expert on predictive policing and the Fourth Amendment,

See also:Digital Privacy Rights of Probationers

Similarly, earlier this year, the Court decided Packingham v. North Carolina, which addressed the prevalence and necessity of the internet and social media in a digitized society.

Riley embodies the idea that new technologies and the digital space are different, yet fails to view these devices for what they are rather than what theyre most similar to. A cell phone is not a diary, calendar or any of the technologies cited by by the Court, and to draw a series of slightly-off-the-mark analogies and suggesting they should be treated the same, is not a solution.

In reviewing Carpenter, there are only a few scenarios for the Courteach of which will have lasting implications.

The Court might opt to temporarily put tape over the problem, hiding behind the Third Party Doctrine and wait for the next case to make its way up.

Or it could limit the Doctrines application to CSLI and recognize that carrying a cellular phone does not, in and of itself, amount to consenting to location tracking.

One of the difficulties the Court is confronted with is that the Doctrine, as its been created, doesnt offer a nice neat answer, said Ferguson. The Court may have to rethink their traditional approach to the Fourth Amendment in order to address this new technological threat to privacy and security.

The other difficulty is: If Carpenter is really about the future of the Third Party Doctrine, it is about far more than just cell site recordsit is about the future of a data-driven third party mediated age.

That is a huge question to answer. And, due to the far-reaching consequences any of the scenarios the Court may chose, the Court may also just decide to punt it to a future case.

There are few things we do online that arent connected, in some way, to a third party. As smartphone technology continues to advance, more and more aspects of our lives will be recorded and stored on third-party servers. Lower courts across the country are only just beginning to consider how the Internet of Things will affect our expectations of privacy.

Carpenter is an opportunity for the Supreme Court to reconceive how privacy and security values can be protected in an era of increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies that allow us to remotely control the lights and heat in our homes or monitor intruders.

Lets hope the Justices take it.

Deanna Paul (@thedeannapaul) is a former New York City prosecutor and adjunct professor of trial advocacy at Fordham University School of Law. This fall she will begin attending Columbia Universitys graduate school of journalism. Her nonfiction work has been published by The Marshall Project, Rolling Stone, and WIRED.

See original here:
How Private is Your Cellphone? The Next Fourth Amendment Challenge - Crime Report (subscription)

If youre following along closely, youll recognize a strong similarity between the brief we filed Friday with the U.S. Supreme Courtin a criminal case called Carpenter v. United States and our argument to a District Court in California two weeks ago that the IRS should not be able to access Bitcoin users data willy-nilly. The theme running through both is that people have property rights in data about themselves that is allocated by contract between them and their service providers. Thats true whether the service being provided is cryptocurrency trading or cellular telecommunications.

In an article I published with the National Constitution Center earlier this year, I laid out a fully consistent way to apply the Fourth Amendment in the digital era. The Supreme Court has struggled with constitutional protections for communications and data, but there doesnt need to be different doctrine for physical things and for digital things. Data can be seized under the Fourth Amendment just like people and cars. Data can be searched just like homes.

In a methodical Fourth Amendment analysis, the next question is who can object to those seizures and searches. Today, various third-party services have control of the data, and some think that closes the question, but it doesnt. The right to possession is only one of the property rights. Those contracts have allocated to consumers the right to exclude othersthat is, to keep strangers away from data about them. The data may sit with a telecom provider, a crypto exchange, a cloud service, or an ISP, but our privacy comes from denying them any right to share data other than with parties agreed to in advance under conditions agreed to in advance.

When possession of data is with a service provider but the right to exclude and other rights are held by the consumer, the consumer has a right against unreasonable searches and seizures. In all but the narrowest of cases involving exigency and similar circumstances, that means the government has to go get a warrant.

Getting courts to recognize property rights in data is a big effort, and itll take a lot of work over a lot of years. But it is essential work because it will determine the shape of our future world.

Theres a path into the future where the Internet revolution causes the individual to become a pawn of governments and corporationsworking together, as often as not, to determine many, many dimensions of how we live and earn. Down the other path is a future where property rights in data make us even more free and autonomous in the digital realm then we are in our homes, neighborhoods, and marketplaces. Heres to charting our course down that second path.

Original post:
Defending 4th Amendment Privacy Protections for Digital Property - Competitive Enterprise Institute (blog)

Timothy Carpenter and Timothy Sanders were convicted in federal court on charges stemming from a string of armed robberies in and around the Detroit area. They appealed on the ground that the government had acquired detailed records of their movements through cell site location information (CSLI) from their wireless carriers in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit turned their appeal aside, finding that [t]he governments collection of business records containing these data is not a search.

The Fourth Amendment states that [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. Presumably, when called on to determine whether a Fourth Amendment violation has occurred, courts would analyze the elements of this language as follows: Was there a search? Was there a seizure? Was any such search or seizure of their persons, houses, papers, [or] effects? Was any such search or seizure reasonable?

In cases involving familiar physical objects, they usually do. In harder cases dealing with unfamiliar items such as communications and data, however, courts retreat to the Supreme Courts reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine that emerged from Katz v. United States (1967). The Court has decided to review the important criminal-procedure and digital-privacy issues here.

Cato and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, joined by Reason Foundation and the Committee for Justice, filed anamicus brief urging the Court to return to the text of the Fourth Amendment. The reasonable expectation of privacy test is outdated because it lacks a strong connection to the text and asks courts to conduct a sociological exercise rather than a judicial one. This is especially true in the context of new technology, where societal expectations have not been fully formed yet and will change based on the Courts judgment, leading to circular reasoning.

Courts have also used the reasonable expectation of privacy test to undermine the very things the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect. For instance, dog sniffs looking for drugs have been said to not compromise any legitimate interest in privacy because they are only looking for contraband. But just because a search is designed to look for illegal activity doesnt mean that the Fourth Amendment is inapplicable.

Likewise with the third-party doctrine, which holds that constitutional protections stop when protected information is shared.

The Carpenter case deals with information about a persons location for more than 100 days, and yet the government claims that no privacy is violated when it seizes and searches that data. The Court should return to the text of the Fourth Amendment and recognize that data and digital communication are property that are protected by the papers and effects part of the Fourth Amendment, as it did in Riley v. Californiathe 2014 case where the justices unanimously required a warrant for searching a phone seized during an arrest.

Here, the government ordered the information on Mr. Carpenters location turned over (a seizure) and then processed that data for the location of the defendants (a search). The defendants had a contract with the phone company prohibiting the distribution of the data and the Court should recognize the property interest that the defendants had based on that contract.

In sum, the Fourth Amendment presumes that a warrant is required but for exceptional circumstances. There was no exigency that threatens the destruction of the data here, threat to officer safety, or any other reason that law enforcement officers could not get a warrant if they had probable cause. Focusing on the actual text of the Fourth Amendment demonstrates that the governments actions here violated the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court will hearCarpenter v. United States this fall.

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To Apply the Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age, Go Back to Its Text - Cato Institute (blog)

View Full Document as PDF

For nearly 40 years,[1] this Court and courts below have struggled with using a sociological method for interpreting the Fourth Amendment in difficult cases. They have asked whether government agents disturbed a reasonable expectation of privacy, reasoning backward from the answer to whether or not a search offensive to the Constitution has occurred.

That methodology has been difficult for courts to apply consistently, and in recent years this Court has used it less and less often as a decision rule. This Court should shed that sociological approach and adopt a juridical method for applying the Fourth Amendment. It should assess the facts of the case in terms of the law, encouraging lower courts to do the same.

Specifically, the Court should examine the following questions:

Using that simple and familiar legal methodology would allow this Court to address directly the challenging questions this case presents, including: When does a seizure of data occur? When does a search of data occur? When is data a constitutional paper or effect? Who has property rights in data sufficient to assert Fourth Amendment rights in it?

The governments compulsory acquisition of data in this case was a seizure. Processing the data to make it human-readable was a search. The records were in relevant part the property of Messrs. Carpenter and Sanders, who enjoyed contractual rights and regulatory protections making them so. And digital documents are best treated as constitutional papers or effects.

That leaves the question whether it was reasonable for the government to seize and search them. There is a presumption in favor of the warrant requirement suggested by the text of the Fourth Amendment, and it is confirmed by this Courts precedents. Thus, it was unreasonable to seize and search the data without a warrant. Lacking exigency or other excuse, the government should have gotten one.

The interests of Messrs. Carpenter and Sanders are not paramount to amici, of course. But as the importance of digital communications and data grows in society, the imperative to straightforwardly address their legal and constitutional status rises.

Without breaking from precedents, this Court can revise Fourth Amendment practice and determine when and how communications and data fit into the Fourth Amendments categories of protected things. Doing so would permit courts below to address seizures and searches of communications and data forthrightly, confidently assessing the reasonableness of such government action. Here, the result of that analysis calls for the Court to find in favor of the petitioner.

Read the full brief here.

[1] Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), was decided on December 18, 1967.

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Brief of Amici Curiae of CEI, Cato and Reason Foundation in Carpenter v. US - Competitive Enterprise Institute (blog)

WAYNESBORO A lawsuit was filed Tuesday against an Augusta County Sheriff's investigator accused of violating the constitutional rights of a man charged in Waynesboro with distribution of methamphetamine.

The suit against Sheriff's investigator Michael Roane was filedon Tuesdayby Nexus Caridades, a law firm sponsored by the Verona-based Nexus Services.

The suit says that dating back to 2011, Roane has harassed Loren Varner and more recently violated his Fourth Amendment rights. During a Jan. 11, 2017 search outside of a Waynesboro restaurant, the suit said Varner was forced to empty his pockets and have his body searched by Roane, and a drug dog was used to search Varner's truck. The suit said this occurred after Varner had gone to the restaurant to eat.

According to the suit, a handler of the drug dog slapped Varner's truck, causing the dog to falsely alert on the truck and serve as probable cause for a search of the truck.

The suit said the search of Varner's truck produced no drugs or material related to drugs. Roane asked Varner to submit to a breath analysis, and Varner refused. Varner was not arrested or charged in the Jan. 11 encounter.

The suit seeks damages and attorney fees against Roane for what it calls Fourth Amendment unreasonable search and seizure violations stemming from the search of Varner's truck and the allegedly false drug alert'' of the dog on the man's truck.

The suit also mentions that Varner was charged in connection with a May 6, 2016 incident involving a sting by a drug task force that included Roane.

According to court records, Varner was charged in Waynesboro in 2016 with intent to distribute methamphetamine. The charge carries a 20-year minimum jail sentence upon conviction.

Waynesboro Police Capt. Mike Martin said he found the suspect with nearly two pounds of meth, and arrested him as a result of a joint investigation with Roane. The trial date for Varner is scheduled for Sept. 5.

Nexus CEO Mike Donovan said he hopes the case shines a light on the potential for Fourth Amendment violations by police.

The Fourth Amendment means absolutely nothing if officers believe they can fraudulently manufacture probable cause, Donovan said. This officer has a track record of these type of allegations, and the people of Augusta County deserve better."

Donovan was referring to a second case in which Roane is also a defendant. The federal lawsuit filed in June by Nexus Caridades on behalf of Desiree Watford of Fishersville charges Fourth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment constitutional violations.

Roane, and a Sheriff's deputy identified as John Doe, are accused of an unlawful seizure and arrest of Watford.

Previously, Roane was a defendant along with Augusta County Sheriff Donald Smith in a $1.2 million federal lawsuit filed by Nexus. That suit, filed by Nexus Services in 2016, charged law enforcement officers with harassing and violating the constitutional rights of Nexus employees, including Donovan. Nexus, however, dropped that lawsuit in March.

Attempts to reach Augusta County Smith about the most recent lawsuiton Wednesdaywere not successful.

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Augusta Sheriff's investigator sued for alleged Fourth Amendment violations - The Daily Progress