Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/protecting-the-fourth-amendment-in-the-information-age
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 04:21:29+00:00

Document:
Robert Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has offered a new analysis for the Fourth Amendment in the Information Age, grounded in two cases arising from the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs.1 As opposing counsel or amicus in the cases he cites in his argument, I thought it would be useful to respond.
Like Mr. Litt, I am not a legal academic but, like him, I have the practical experience of having handled numerous lawsuits involving the Fourth Amendment and national security, in my case for over 20 years. Also like Mr. Litt, I do not propose a comprehensive theory of the Fourth Amendment. Instead, this Essay responds to his suggestions and points to what I submit is a better starting point—the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, also known as the Necessary and Proportionate Principles10—for considering the problems he raises with Fourth Amendment doctrine.
Mr. Litt makes two initial statements with which I agree. First, he notes that the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test currently employed in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is a poor test for the digital age. Second, he states that the “third-party doctrine”—under which an individual who voluntarily provides information to a third party loses any reasonable expectation of privacy in that information—should not be an on-off switch for the Fourth Amendment. On this second point, Mr. Litt wisely recognizes that some members of the Supreme Court are uneasy with the third-party doctrine.11 His misgivings about the third-party doctrine are most welcome; many in the government, including the Department of Justice in Klayman, continue to claim that all constitutional protection shuts off whenever data is entrusted to a service provider.
From there, however, our paths diverge quite sharply.
Eliminating the per se rule and the prohibition on general warrants would also help the government evade one of the strongest arguments against UPSTREAM surveillance in Jewel v. NSA. There, the government has admitted that it conducts warrantless full-content searches of a large number of nonsuspect Americans’ communications that travel over the Internet backbone—contrary to Mr. Litt’s contentions that such factual assertions are purely hypothetical.15 The government calls this “about” searching, since it searches the content of communications for messages that are “about” targets, in addition to the searching it does for messages to or from the targets themselves.16 There are FISA court orders signing off on this activity at a very high programmatic level.17 But these orders do not address the suspicionless collection and search of Americans’ international communications, nor the large “incidental” collection and search of Americans’ fully domestic communications without any probable cause.
Under current doctrine, since Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of their communications, full-content searching is per se unconstitutional unless an exception to the warrant requirement applies. None does. In order to prevail, therefore, the government must convince the Supreme Court to read a broad national security “special needs” exception into the Fourth Amendment authorizing mass, suspicionless seizure and full-content searches of millions of nonsuspect Americans’ most private international and domestic communications. That is a tall order: the Court would effectively have to create an implied national security exception to the Fourth Amendment that would admittedly affect billions of communications by millions of innocent Americans.
Such a large implied exception does not readily align with history: the Fourth Amendment contains no national security exception, even though it was adopted in the shadow of the Revolutionary War. Further, the Fourth Amendment was expressly intended to prevent general warrants.18 The FISA Court of Review—where the government alone presents its case and the arguments and decisions are kept secret—has recognized some form of a national security exception.19 But the government may not wish to see the Supreme Court, whose proceedings are adversarial and highly public, consider whether to create such a large and unprecedented exception.
In practice, the government almost always claims that details of the “actual” surveillance of a person, or even whether a person’s communications are included in the surveillance, are protected by the state-secrets privilege, making it even more difficult for the individual to show particularized harm. As a result, it is difficult to imagine a situation where the government would not prevail under Mr. Litt’s framing.
This argument—what I call the “human-eyes” theory of the Fourth Amendment—is where we most seriously disagree. Mr. Litt’s “human-eyes” theory would effectively authorize a surveillance state in which a person’s every action and interaction could be technologically monitored and algorithmically analyzed without violating the Fourth Amendment, as long as a human only saw “suspicious” information selected by the technology.
Third, the “human-eyes” reformulation essentially writes the word “seizures” out of the text of the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court has long held that the prohibition against unreasonable seizures is grounded in property rights; for digital communications, the relevant possessory interest violated by a Fourth Amendment seizure is expressed as the right to “dominion and control” over property.30 In Jewel, the government usurps individuals’ “dominion and control” of their data by inspecting millions of nonsuspect communications as they travel across the fiber optic cables of providers like AT&T. The government attempts to skirt this problem by redefining “collection” as the point at which human eyes review the information. But this is inconsistent with plain meaning of the word “collection.”31 It is also inconsistent with the statutory law under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act of 1968, which triggers a wiretap upon the “interception”32 of an electronic communication “through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device,”33 not at the point of human review.
The context of UPSTREAM surveillance is dramatically different. The duration of the seizure bears no relationship to its intrusiveness. Even if the government completes its wholesale copying, filtering, and full-text analysis in a blink of an eye, those actions are still highly invasive. And unlike the dog sniffs, the investigation opens the content of the messages to government inspection.37 Dog sniffs are also inapt comparisons because the only thing revealed in a contraband search is the presence or absence of illegal material. By contrast, mentioning the name of a U.S. target in an email or on a social network, which triggers UPSTREAM surveillance, is not onlylegal—it is fully protected speech.
Overall, Mr. Litt’s formulation misses the central goal of the Fourth Amendment to prevent general searches. His argument is that, as long as no responsive information is found, the fact that a seizure and search occurred does not matter, even if done without suspicion and on a massive scale. This might be right if the Framers such as James Otis only objected to searches of their houses that turned up evidence of a crime. They did not.38 In colonial times, of course, most of a person’s “papers” and other sources of information were located in the home, while today those papers regularly travel via a person’s ISP like AT&T and are stored digitally with services such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Nevertheless, the possessory privacy and dominion interest in the content of the information that Americans routinely store with such services and service providers—including medical records, financial information, business plans, and religious and personal communications—is no less important today than in the eighteenth century. While it might sound like historical science fiction, had the British troops instead employed robots able to search though a colonist’s house in a matter of seconds, it seems doubtful that Otis and his compatriots would have been unconcerned.
But even Crist, which involved the investigation of a single device that had been suspected of containing contraband, and Bourgeois, which was based on past incidents of illegal action, do not accurately reflect the breadth and the complete lack of suspicion involved in the NSA programs Mr. Litt defends. The expansion is twofold: both the number of nonsuspect people subject to review and the number of nonsuspect communications reviewed are far greater.
Mr. Litt relies on agency “minimization procedures” as a key factor in his “reasonableness” balancing test.44 Of course, those, too, are generally kept secret—less than they used to be, as Mr. Litt points out, but they are still not fully transparent. But more importantly, there is still no opportunity for the public to know, much less a petitioner to challenge, whether the procedures that exist on paper in fact operate to sufficiently minimize the impact on non-suspects inside or outside the United States. We do know that the government minimization procedures allow reuse of information for domestic criminal investigations.45 But even such fundamental questions as how often Americans’ information comes up in searches remain unknown despite many requests for information, including by House Committee members.46 In the words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts: “The Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.”47 It is cold comfort for our constitutional rights to rest on secret, agency-promulgated procedures with no chance for adversarial investigation or challenge.
The Necessary and Proportionate Principles are just a starting point, but I submit that they are more in keeping with the Supreme Court’s admonition in Kyllo that any changes in the doctrine must preserve privacy. What is clear is that if we are going to address where the Fourth Amendment should be in the digital age, we must do better than a free-form balancing test where the government will always be perched on the heavy end of the scales, and where the substitution of computers for humans somehow eliminates our Fourth Amendment right to be secure from unreasonable seizures and searches of our most private communications.
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Thanks to Andrew Crocker, Lee Tien, Sophia Cope, and Christine Bannan for their editorial assistance.
Preferred Citation: Cindy Cohn, Protecting the Fourth Amendment in the Information Age: A Response to Robert Litt, 126 Yale L.J. F. 107 (2016), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/ protecting-the-fourth-amendment-in-the-information-age.
Jewel v. Nat’l Sec. Agency, No. C 08-04373 JSW, 2015 WL 545925 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 10, 2015).
Litt, supra note 1, at 12.
Obama v. Klayman, 800 F.3d 559 (D.C. Cir. 2015).
50 U.S.C. § 1861 (2012).
Smith v. Obama, 816 F.3d 1239 (9th Cir. 2016).
Litt, supra note 1, at 14.
Litt, supra note 1, at 13.
See In re Directives, 551 F.3d 1004 (Foreign Int. Surv. Ct. Rev. 2008).
This argument relies upon the post-Katz ruling in Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 133 (1978).
Litt, supra note 1, at 16.
United States v. U.S. District Court (Keith), 407 U.S. 297, 313 (1972).
18 U.S.C § 2510(4) (definition of interception).
United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 697-99, 702-03, 706-07 (1983).
627 F. Supp. 2d 575, 578 (M.D. Pa. 2008).
387 F.3d 1303, 1307, 1316 (11th Cir. 2004).
Litt, supra note 1, at 16-17.
533 U.S. 27, 34-35 (2001).
Necessary and Proportionate, supra note 10.
Robert S. Litt, The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age, 126 Yale L.J. F. 8 (2016), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/fourth-amendment-information-age [http://perma.cc/4PSQ-QE9P].
Jewel contains claims based on telephone records collection as well as collection from the Internet backbone.
Complaint, First Unitarian Church of L.A. v. Nat’l Sec. Agency, Civ. No. 13-3287. (N.D. Cal. July 16, 2013).
Necessary & Proportionate, Necessary & Proportionate Coalition (May 2014), http://necessaryandproportionate.org/principles [http://perma.cc/L4NU-4KMM]. A list of privacy organizations that cooperatively drafted the Principles can be found here: http://necessaryandproportionate.org/about [http://perma.cc/H3EF-8TBN].
United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945, 957 (2012) (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (“[I]t may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.”).
Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476 (1965) (holding that a warrant ordering officers to search for books, records, pamphlets, cards, receipts, lists, memoranda, pictures, recordings, and other written instruments concerning the state Communist Party was a general warrant and therefore violated the constitutional requirement that warrants particularly describe things to be seized).
See Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 84-86, Privacy & C.L. Oversight Board (Jul. 2014), http://www.pclob.gov/library/702-Report.pdf [http://perma.cc/WU4C-UW28].
See, e.g., In Re DNI/AG Certification, No. 702(i)-08-01, at *18 (U.S. FISC Sept. 4, 2008), http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/0315/FISC%20Opinion%20September%204%202008.pdf [http://perma.cc/8HV4-C9NR].
Stanford, 379 U.S. at 481 (noting that the Fourth Amendment “reflect[s] the determination of those who wrote the Bill of Rights that the people of this new Nation should forever ‘be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects’ from intrusion and seizure by officers acting under the unbridled authority of a general warrant”).
Other commentators have also rejected this theory. See, e.g., Kevin S. Bankston & Amie Stepanovich, When Robot Eyes Are Watching You: The Law & Policy Of Automated Communications Surveillance, 35-37 (U. of Miami Sch. of L. Working Paper), http://robots.law.miami.edu/2014/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Bankston_Stepanovich_We_Robot.pdf [http://perma.cc/V5CK-MB4B].
Jon Penney, Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use, Berkeley Tech. L.J. (forthcoming 2016), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2769645 [http://perma.cc/RQR8-4QXB]; Lee Rainie & Mary Madden, Americans Privacy Strategies Post-Snowden, Pew Res. Stud. (Mar. 16, 2015), http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/03/16/americans-privacy-strategies-post-snowden [http://perma.cc/8NXF-84HJ]; Elizabeth Stoycheff, Under Surveillance: Examining Facebook’s Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Internet Monitoring, 93 Journalism & Mass Comm. Q. 293 (June 2016), http://jmq.sagepub.com/content/93/2/296.full.pdf [http://perma.cc/QB7G-DAZT].
See Complaint at *21-22, Jewel v. Nat’l Sec. Agency, No. C 08-04373 JSW, 2015 WL 545925 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 10, 2015); Complaint at 2, First Unitarian Church of L.A. v. Nat’l Sec. Agency, Civ. No. 13–3287 (N.D. Cal. July 16, 2013).
Plaintiffs’ Motion for Partial Summary Judgment at 21-22, First Unitarian Church of L.A., Civ. No. 13–3287, http://www.eff.org/document/plaintiffs-motion-partial-summary-judgment-0 [http://perma.cc/8SW7-3E87]. Plaintiff’s Declarations are available at http://www.eff.org/document/all-plaintiffs-declarations [http://perma.cc/64QH-P8WG].
Barton Gellman, NSA Broke Privacy Rule Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds, Wash. Post (Aug. 15, 2013), http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html [http://perma.cc/AT2M-JSM3].
See, e.g., Jacobsen v. United States, 466 U.S. 109, 112 (1984); United States v. Ganias, 755 F.3d 125, 137 (2d Cir. 2014); United States v. Perea, 986 F.2d 633, 639-40 (2d Cir. 1993).
See Procedures Governing the Activities of DoD Intelligence Components that Affect United States Persons 15, U.S. Dep’t Def. (1982), http://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf [http://perma.cc/HZK6-AUEV] (“Data collected by electronic means is ‘collected’ only when it has been processed into intelligible form.”); see also Glenn Kessler, Clapper’s ‘Least Untruthful’ Statement to the Senate, Wash. Post (June 12, 2013), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/james-clappers-least-untruthful-statement-to-the-senate/2013/06/11/e50677a8-d2d8-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_blog.html [http://perma.cc/JZD4-8E83] (quoting Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as saying “[t]here are honest differences . . . when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him”).
See 18 U.S.C § 2511(1)(a) (2012); United States v. Councilman, 418 F.3d 67, 70-71, 79 (1st Cir. 2005) (en banc).
In United States v. Hoang, for example, an external dog sniff occurred without any detention or diversion of the package at all; the dog was let loose in a parcel processing room at FedEx. 486 F.3d 1156, 1158 (9th Cir. 2007). Only after the dog alerted to the package and the police had reasonable suspicion that the package contained contraband did the police detain the package. The package was not opened until a warrant was obtained. Id.
Place, 462 U.S. at 707 (“[T]he sniff discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item. Thus, despite the fact that the sniff tells the authorities something about the contents of the luggage, the information obtained is limited. . . . Therefore, we conclude that the particular course of investigation that the agents intended to pursue here—exposure of respondent’s luggage, which was located in a public place, to a trained canine—did not constitute a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.” (emphasis added)).
Other package and luggage cases also do not involve copying data or communications inside the container. See United States v. Va Lerie, 424 F.3d 694, 696-97 (8th Cir. 2005) (en banc) (holding that moving luggage from the bus to the bus station to seek a passenger’s consent to search did not constitute a seizure); United States v. Schofield, 80 F. App’x. 798, 803 (3d Cir. 2003) (determining that lifting a detergent box to reveal only its unusual weight was “almost certainly” not a seizure); United States v. DeMoss, 279 F.3d 632, 634-35 (8th Cir. 2002) (finding that lifting a package off the conveyer belt was not a seizure because the officers observed only external details that the sender had “virtually guaranteed . . . could be observed by the senses”); United States v. Gant, 112 F.3d 239, 242 (6th Cir. 1997) (finding that removing a bag from an overhead compartment was not a seizure); United States v. England, 971 F.2d 419, 420 (9th Cir. 1992) (involving a dog-sniff of a package in the mail); United States v. Hall, 978 F.2d 616, 618 (10th Cir. 1992) (involving lifting luggage to check its weight); United States v. Harvey, 961 F.2d 1361, 1363 (8th Cir. 1992) (same); United States v. Brown, 884 F.2d 1309, 1311 (9th Cir. 1989) (similar).
See, e.g., Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476, 481-82 (1965) (“Vivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans were those general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists. The hated writs of assistance had given customs officials blanket authority to search where they pleased for goods imported in violation of the British tax laws.”); William J. Cuddihy, The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 377-78, 741-42 (2009).
See, e.g., Memorandum and Order at 31-16 (U.S. FISC November 6, 2015), http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/20151106-702Mem_Opinion_Order_for_Public_Release.pdf [http://perma.cc/36CJ-S6W2].
Dan Froomkin, Stonewalled by NSA, Members of Congress Ask Really Basic Question Again, The Intercept (Apr. 22, 2016), http://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/stymied-by-nsa-members-of-congress-ask-really-basic-question-again [http://perma.cc/B5JC-LRDW].
Id. at 7-12; Necessary & Proportionate Global Legal Analysis, Necessary & Proportionate Coalition (May 2014), http://necessaryandproportionate.org/global-legal-analysis [http://perma.cc/T65Y-8DM6].

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