Quotes About Fourth Amendment

Whether you breach the Fourth Amendment 20 percent of the time or 100 percent of the time, it's still not the point. The point is whether or not you still collect millions of people's information with a single warrant.

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.

It would not be permissible for you to build a home and not let law enforcement in if they had a search warrant. If they think there's a crime ongoing, they go to court and get a warrant, and they're permitted to come in your home under the Fourth Amendment.

From the Fourth Amendment to post-Watergate reforms to the national outcry when Bush's warrantless surveillance was revealed in 2005, the United States has a strong tradition of overseeing the government's power to spy on its citizens.

There is no right of privacy written into the Constitution. There is the Fourth Amendment, protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures. But there is a notion, an important notion, of liberty—that we should have liberty to carry on with our lives without Big Brother Government looking over our shoulder. That idea has come from the guarantee, the due process guarantee of liberty, rather than an explicit right of privacy.

The Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of us all - from ordinary citizens up to candidates for president. If we allow this precious right to be ignored when dealing with a presidential campaign, it can be ignored when dealing with the rest of us.

I want to collect more records from terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans. The Fourth Amendment was what we fought the Revolution over! John Adams said it was the spark that led to our war for independence, and I'm proud of standing for the Bill of Rights, and I will continue to stand for the Bill of Rights.

The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations.

Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.

The Obama administration, like those before it, promotes a disturbingly narrow interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, misapplying the facts of old analog cases to a radically different digital world.

In California v. Hodari D. in 1991, the Court held that a person who is being chased by the police is not considered to be seized until he or she is actually tackled by the officer; chasing the individual does not constitute a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.63 But fifteen states have rejected this idea and said that under their state constitutions, chasing a suspect is sufficient to constitute a seizure and thus requires at least reasonable suspicion.64

The Fourth Amendment protects people, not property, the Court stressed. A person's Fourth Amendment rights do not depend on where he or she is at the time of the government intrusion, nor on whether a physical trespass occurs.

Fourth Amendment protection against a search has a "twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as 'reasonable.'"11

California v. Greenwood in 1988, the Court held that when police searched a person's garbage that was left on the street for pickup, there was not a search, and no warrant was required.

That the search violated the Fourth Amendment was undisputed—it had been done without probable cause. But the Supreme Court ruled that the evidence was nonetheless admissible at trial.

when police violate the Fourth Amendment's requirement for "knock and announce," the exclusionary rule does not apply.

The Court held that the exclusionary rule may be applied only if police intentionally or recklessly violate the Fourth Amendment or only if police department violations with regard to searches and seizures are systemic.

Instead, the Court's conservative majority that already wanted to limit the exclusionary rule issued a sweeping decision that evidence never has to be excluded if the police violate the Fourth Amendment in good faith or through negligence.

Justice Stewart wrote that the way the search was done had nothing to do with the reliability of the evidence.

Schneckloth v. Bustamonte is important on many levels. First, it dramatically empowers police to be able to search. It obviates the need for police to meet all the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, such as the need for probable cause (or at least reasonable suspicion) and the need for a warrant. It is estimated that consent searches comprise over 90 percent of all warrantless searches.

Stone v. Powell in 1976, the Court concluded that Fourth Amendment claims that had been raised and decided in state courts could not be heard in federal habeas corpus review.

the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party . . ., even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed."55

Miller says that when police obtain information that a person has shared with a third party, it is not a search. Therefore, the requirements for probable cause and a warrant—the key protections of privacy under the Fourth Amendment—do not apply or need to be met.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later applied this notion to say that government can monitor the email addresses a person sends to or receives from, or a list of the websites a person visits, without needing