Carpenter vs the United States Privacy and Surveillance

Privacy and Surveillance - Carpenter vs. the United States

The issue of government surveillance and privacy ethics has resulted in an abrupt and dismissive resolve that the government should not conduct surveillance of individuals. However, the government relies on some of these data to execute its mandates, such as intelligence for security planning.

The Carpenter v. the United States, 585 U.S. (2018) arose after Timothy Ivory Carpenter had been suspected of planning robberies, supplying guns, and acting as an outlook since 2010 (PBS, 2018). The core issues in the case were: a retrospective window that it offers to law enforcement, intimacy and comprehensiveness of data, the expense incurred to obtain it, and whether it was truly shared voluntarily with a third party.

Carpenter’s defenses argued that the prosecutor relied on months-long records obtained from Carpenter’s cell phone company to prove that he was nearby where the robberies happened. This confirmed whether he had spent the night at home and went to church was the norm on dates when the robberies happened (Laptak, 2018). The court found Carpenter guilty and sentenced him to 116 years in prison. The court found that the facts of the case fell squarely within the third-party doctrine framework in the Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence.

The dissenting argument held that the third-party and the reliance on determining the suitability of instances when private data can be collected were outdated and the precedent upon which they were established. The Fourth Amendment safeguards the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” (Hecht-Felella, 2021).

Notably, there are exceptions to the privacy test since the amendment emerges from English Common law that holds that every man’s home is their castle and should be treated as such. However, this precedent was interpreted as tangible and material possessions or an actual physical invasion of houses, papers, persons, and effects. In Katz, the court abandoned the trespass doctrine and held that the use of electronic recording devices to spy on public phone booths had not violated the trespass doctrine. The court also maintained that a search had been conducted and the Fourth Amendment purposed to protect people and not places.

Justice John Marshall Harlan’s held that the Fourth Amendment cannot contradict the presence or absence of physical intrusion. Further, he argued that the constitution protects against government intrusion when a person exhibits expectation of privacy, which society recognizes as a reasonable expectation.

Consequently, Katz was adopted as the foundation of the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that holds that encroachment of privacy by law enforcement surveillance even when there is no physical intrusion (Hecht-Felella, 2021). The Stored Communications Act allows prosecutors to obtain tracking data, and the showing derived is not probable cause, as is the standard for a warrant (Power et al., 2021). Suppose such a stance is to be taken. In that case, they must demonstrate specific and articulable facts that material grounds to believe that the phone records sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.

In Carpenter’s case, the prosecutors had reasonable grounds to believe that the phone records sought had been relevant and material to the ongoing criminal investigations of his whereabouts on specific dates. Notably, the access to such records raises concerns about the scope of data the defendant’s lawyers would have access to and how it would impact the court proceedings (Hecht-Felella, 2021).

Therefore, there are not only legal concerns that arise from the access to such data but the breach of business particulars, violation of the owner’s intimacy privacy, expense, retrospectivity, and voluntariness. The government’s premise to access data is that there is no prior knowledge about an offense; hence the government works backward to investigate the issue (Laptak, 2018). The unprecedented consequence is that technology works against everyone since they might have a clear recollection of their day-to-day activities.

However, law enforcement needs to access Cell-Site Location Information (CLSI) to trace suspects’ whereabouts subject to the cell phone carrier’s retention policies. While the constitution stipulates the reason for these protections, the government has left the room to ensure that the amendment does not limit the law enforcement and courts to execute their mandate (Power et al., 2021).

However, the limitation of the collection within the prescribed process raises the risk of wrongful misappropriation of private data (Geneviève et al., 2019). However, the measures stipulated for the due process are insufficient, which greatly relies upon the morality of the individuals handling the data (Fitch, 2013).