It's unfortunate that so often the constitution is defended in cases where there's clear wrongdoing, but I sure hope the fourth is upheld, and law enforcement learns to - and is forced to by court rulings - knock it off with massive orwellian surveillance
How else could it be defended? Considering that someone has to show injury before courts will take up a case, it's usually going to be someone that's been charged with a crime whose privacy has been invaded.
ahh i see the lack of clarity - i was referring to cases where the person whose rights were violated was someone clearly guilty of or at least very likely did commit the crime with which they are charged
The FBI/NSA/Police won't let those cases get to this point.
Every time a case with an innocent starts winding through, the government drops the case, after having caused much grief to the innocent in question, rather than risk having their surveillance powers curtailed.
I'd argue its neither massive, nor terribly orwellian, right now its a bunch of private companies generating a huge number of data points, which the government then sometimes uses.
There is no known program to monitor in real time the position of every citizen - right now all of the data the government uses is incidental to the voluntary use of another service. I don't take much issue with the service generating that data - but in no case should it be considered commoditizable nor should the government be able to access it on a whim for whatever purpose the government sees fit.
Right now the process is working as defined, the law exists to constrain abuses, and to a lesser extent prevent them - but the presumption of the founders was that government will always try to take the maximum amount of power it can, and that the courts exist largely to strike the balance.
