Slobogin concludes that a “continued development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence” would render physical and transactional surveillance “constitutionally visible” while continuing to make these types of surveillance available to the government whenever it really needed them.
Is Slobogin’s work as important and necessary to our privacy and security as I think it is? Take the case of Hasan Elahi, an art professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, whom the FBI mistook for a terrorist in June 2002. For six months, he answered their questions and passed their polygraph tests. Eventually he developed a website where he posts photographs taken with a cell phone every few minutes, detailing his location and activities. Lest you think his work absurd at best, logs on his site tracking the people visiting it show that authorities regularly continue to monitor him.
I urge you to read Privacy At Risk and find ways to halt the insidious tendency of our current legislation to support unreasonable and unwarranted surveillance of our persons and homes. With Congress set to take a vote sometime this summer to make the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act permanent, it is important to take action now. Begin by informing yourself with Privacy at Risk. Other resources include the American Civil Liberties Union page on surveillance and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee’s tips for local organizations to pass resolutions at the community and municipal level to protect privacy and liberty.
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