Recent court opinions on National Security Agency phone...

Recent court opinions on National Security Agency phone surveillance indicate that understanding of the Fourth Amendment may need to change, argued Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She pointed to two federal court decisions from December, one calling phone metadata bulk collection likely to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment and another upholding the practice. She favored the reasoning of the former and examined the broader legal context. “A consensus seems to be emerging that the Fourth Amendment must evolve along with technology and government surveillance capabilities, and that it is the job of the lower courts to investigate and to rule accordingly,” she wrote in a Just Security blog post Tuesday (http://bit.ly/KmNnv5). “If lower courts slavishly follow the closest analogous Supreme Court case on hand, rather than seriously consider whether facts, policies and practices on the ground have changed, higher courts will not benefit from the best fact-finding and the best legal reasoning incubated in the lower federal courts.” She predicted courts will ultimately find the Fourth Amendment prohibits such bulk surveillance, which she called an “unprecedented power” of the government.