Govt: Our Cameras In Your House Are Reasonable Thus Legal

[grarpamp]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-fourth-amendment-analysis-idUSKBN14A25F

Yahoo Inc's secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S.
spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen
constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary
governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed
on closed court hearings. The order on Yahoo from the secret Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) last year resulted from the
government's drive to change decades of interpretation of the U.S.
Constitution's Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure against
"unreasonable searches and seizures," intelligence officials and
others familiar with the strategy told Reuters. The unifying idea,
they said, is to move the focus of U.S. courts away from what makes
something a distinct search and toward what is "reasonable" overall.
The basis of the argument for change is that people are making much
more digital data available about themselves to businesses, and that
data can contain clues that would lead to authorities disrupting
attacks in the United States or on U.S. interests abroad. While it
might technically count as a search if an automated program trawls
through all the data, the thinking goes, there is no unreasonable harm
unless a human being looks at the result of that search and orders
more intrusive measures or an arrest, which even then could be
reasonable. Civil liberties groups and some other legal experts said
the attempt to expand the ability of law enforcement agencies and
intelligence services to sift through vast amounts of online data, in
some cases without a court order, was in conflict with the Fourth
Amendment because many innocent messages are included in the initial
sweep. But the general counsel of the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (ODNI), Robert Litt, said in an interview with
Reuters on Tuesday that the legal interpretation needed to be adjusted
because of technological changes.