The Supreme Court ruled today that the government cannot use warrantless GPS tracking devices because doing so violates a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights against unwarranted search and seizure.
Writing for the Court, Justice Scalia held:
that the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search”
in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
A Freedom of Information Act (‘FOIA’) lawsuit (below) by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (‘EPIC’) reveals that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security paid contractors to monitor Facebook, Twitter other social networks, blogs, and comments on news media websites.
The documents (below) disclose that the federal government paid at least $1.16 million to private contractor General Dynamics to monitor social networks, blogs, and news media sites for “public reaction to major governmental proposals with homeland security implications.” That’s government bureaucratic-speak for public dissent.
The legal implications of U.S. social networking surveillance programs tracking dissent of its own citizens, even with open source tools, are deeply disturbing.
Facebook is hacking Congress. But don’t be alarmed.
It’s all legal. Really.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers and their staffs are making nice on Capitol Hill this afternoon in a hackathon with Facebook engineers and software developers.
Mark Zucerkberg’s team is helping Senators, Representatives, and congressional staffers brush up on their social media skills.
Would televising U.S. Supreme Court proceedings promote transparency in the country’s highest legal institution and help generate public confidence in the judiciary, or would putting the court’s oral arguments on TV or the Internet demean the institution?
These and other questions were raised in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning on “Access to the Court: Televising the Supreme Court.”
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