Essay On The Fourth Amendment

763 Words4 Pages

The fourth amendment prohibits, "unreasonable searches and seizures", and protects citizens' privacy within reasonable measures. Now, how does this tie into modern technology, and should the use of this information be considered a violation of people's constitutional right to privacy? Police should not be able to obtain information stored by personal devices or their carriers, as the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees privacy to the United States citizens. In that case that the authorities were to use information from a person's personal device without a proper warrant, they would be in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment was established in order to protect the privacies of the United States …show more content…

According to Larry Greenemeier, a recent court case, Carpenter V. United States "specifically pits the privacy of information that wireless devices share with their service providers-the towers or " cell sites" devices connect to, the phone numbers they call and answer, and the time and length of those calls-against law enforcement's authority to retrieve that data without a warrant." However, the FBI issued court orders under the 1986 SCA in order to compel carriers to turn that information over to the FBI. This would be acceptable despite the fact that a warrant requires more reasoning to receive. If they felt strongly enough that they had reason to obtain certain information, they should have to convince a judge to see the situation from the same point of view. “ Without a warrant, but with the SCA court order in hand-the FBI compelled MetroPCS to provide about four months of location records for a smartphone owned by suspect Timothy Ivory Carpenter.” Based off of the information the authorities had previously, it would not have been hard to convince a judge to issue them a warrant. If authorities truly have reasonable examples of why the information is needed, then they should receive a warrant. If they cannot give acceptable reasons to obtain data, then they have no right to do so due to the fact that judges do not see it fit. Without a