According to Newsweek writer Jessica Bennett in her December 3, 2007 article entitled “Smile! You’re on Camera,” the average American is caught on tape 200 times a day.
This isn’t news to Christopher Slobogin, author of Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment. This very important, well-written book should be required reading for every government employee from the local rookie police officer to the president. Slobogin, law professor at the University of Florida’s Fredric G. Levin College of Law, writes clearly and in depth about the different kinds of surveillance the government practices on its citizens and, perhaps more importantly, the lack of legal regulation of these surveillance practices. He also eruditely proposes expanding the fourth amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures to include these new technologies the founding fathers could never have imagined.
Slobogin introduces his book by defining and enumerating the two types of surveillance: physical and transactional. Using the American Bar Association’s Standards on Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance, Slobogin divides the technologies available into five categories: cameras, tracking devices, telescopic devices, illumination devices, and detection devices (capable of revealing concealed items, such as the x-ray scanners at airports, for example).
He then divides transactional surveillance into two types: target-driven, where an agent of the law uses a commercial data broker or snoopware to mine information on a specific person, and event-driven. As an example of an event-driven transactional surveillance, Slobogin writes,
- Say, for instance, that the police know that a sniper-killer wears a particular type of shoe, ... that he owns a particular type of sweater, ... and that he reads Elmore Leonard novels. ... Once police obtain the credit card numbers of those who bought, say, the type of sweater found at the murder scene, they can trace other purchases made with the same card, to see if the relevant type of shoe or book was bought by any of the same people. Of course, if there is a match on one or more of the three items, the surveillance may then turn into a target-driven investigation.
Why is Slobogin’s book so important? As he points out in “A Preview of the Book,” on page 17, “The [Supreme] Court’s willingness to declare that persons cannot reasonably expect their interactions with businesses and banks, their daily wanderings, and even some of their conduct at home to be free from suspicionless, warrantless surveillance by the government is contrary to societal mores and other legal norms.” Thanks to his research and very well-reasoned arguments, we have the information we need to combat the government’s post 9/11 trend toward warrantless surveillance and an easily understandable method whereby the judicial system can oblige legislatures into creating useful laws to protect us from unreasonable surveillance without compromising the government’s ability to investigate crime.
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