Aguila Blanca
Staff
I respectfully disagree. You are conflating the common definition of the noun "effect," meaning "result," with the legal term, which means "possession" (in the noun form).Dixie Gunsmithing said:
The Supreme Court long ago ruled that the record of what numbers you called on your land line phone, on what dates and at what times, are not protected and the government does not need a search warrant to access that information. The government's argument is that these cell phone records are the same thing. It isn't wiretapping -- intercepting or recording -- the conversations themselves, it is only looking at the record of where and when the calls were made, and to what numbers.
I can accept that distinction, but I'm not happy about it for a couple of reasons. First, I think everyone who ever had a land line phone knew that the telephone company (in the days when there was only one "telephone company") kept those records. After all, your bill every month clearly showed every long distance call, what number and city it was to, and how long it lasted. We never had any doubt or question that these records existed.
On the other hand, my late father spent his entire working life (except for a few years off in India and China saving the free world) toiling for Ma Bell. In fact, he was in a department related to billing. As far as I know, there were no records created of local calls, so for those there was what would today be called "an expectation of privacy."
The key point of the 4th amendment is (IMHO) that
I don't think many people who use cell phones fully understand the extent to which each call leaves a trail, so there's the question of whether there is an expectation of privacy (and, or course, the related question of whether or not we are entitled to one). But, at the core, with cell phones now so integrally a part of so many people's lives, at what time do we cross the line from searching a record to searching a person? If a cop makes a traffic stop and you hand him your wallet when he asks for your license, even if the license is clearly visible in a window pocket he'll tell you to just take out the license and hand it to him. Even if he has reason to conduct a Terry frisk on you, he has no legal authority to start looking in your wallet.
In my view a cell phone, especially a smart phone that holds not just phone calls but also photos of your wife and kids, memos about your work, e-mails, etc., is more than a telephone. It has become an electronic wallet. I think we DO have an expectation of privacy with respect to that. The issue is whether or not that expectation can or should extend to the government being allowed to collect -- automatically and in enormous volume -- the "meta data" associated with this electronic wallet with no probable cause, not even reasonable suspicion, but simply because the government has the technology and the computing horsepower to do so. In other words, "We're doing it because we can do it."
My view is that THIS is an unreasonable search of my life, and therefore of my person.