“At John Roberts’ confirmation hearings last week, there weren’t enough discussions about science fiction. Technologies that are science fiction today will become constitutional questions before Roberts retires from the bench. The same goes for technologies that cannot even be conceived of now. And many of these questions involve privacy… They will include questions of surveillance, profiling and search and seizure. And the decisions of the Supreme Court on these questions will have a profound effect on society.”
–Bruce Schneier, writing in WIRED magazine
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68911,00.html?tw=rss.TOP
To my mind, the most troubling issue facing privacy advocates (a group of which I would consider myself a member) is the redefinition of probable cause. Probable cause is law enforcement’s free pass around warrant requirements, and it has a rightful place in the legal system. If police hear a woman screaming for help behind the locked door of a private residence, they shouldn’t need a warrant to go inside.
That said, technology could be used to manufacture probable cause. For example, Schneier quotes this scenario: “Sometime in the near future, a young man is walking around the Washington Monument for 30 minutes. Cameras capture his face, which yields an identity. That identity is queried in a series of commercial databases, producing his travel records, his magazine subscriptions and other personal details. This is all fed into a computerized scoring system, which singles him out as a potential terrorist threat. He is stopped by the police, who open his backpack and find a bag of marijuana. Is the opening of that backpack a legal search as defined by the Constitution?”
The proposed scoring system manufactured probable cause, creating what some would characterize as a “reasonable” expectation that the suspect was dangerous. It will be up to the Supreme Court to determine whether such technology used in such a fashion is indeed “reasonable” and I’m not entirely convinced that the Court as it is currently comprised is up to the task.
Anybody want to persuade me I’m wrong?