No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. |
| | The right to privacy is one of the most salient civil liberties issues today, despite the fact that the word "privacy" neither appears in the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights. The Right to Privacy, famously called the "right to be left alone" by Justice Blackmun, is built on combination of the right to "liberty", as described in the fifth and fourteenth amendments and the ninth amendment. Privacy, in turn, underlies a wide range of issues, including reproductive freedom, the "fundamental fairness" of investigations and police procedures, and online "cyber-liberties." The Right to Privacy is a very dynamic area of civil liberties law because it must change in time with new technology, such as the internet, and because it relies on the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard, which is itself very malliable. |
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Friday, August 23, 2002 |
FBI Misled Intelligence Court to Avoid Fourth Amendment
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court which approves FBI electronic surveillance requests, said that it was misled "an alarming number of times" in 2001 and 2002 on the intentions of FBI surveillance requests. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FBI has a much lower evidence standard to request a surveillance warrant to be used for counter intelligence purposes, but the information they gather cannot be used for any domestic criminal investigation. The court said that it was frequently misled by the FBI that this "wall of separation" between counterintelligence and criminal investigations was being maintained.
Surprisingly, the court actually praised the Ashcroft Justice department for cleaning up these abuses, but the court had also rejected the Justice department's request earlier this year to circumvent the FISA protections, saying that the request was not reasonably designed to protect Americans' privacy.
The full opinion is also available. [PDF, link from The Washington Post and Slashdot.]
[New York Times: National]
3:34:41 PM 
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© Copyright 2002 Lucas Burke.
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