Surveillance: Cozy or Chilling?
By NOAM COHEN, NYT
LAST year, two literal-minded Supreme Court justices were considering whether police officers needed a warrant before placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s S.U.V. when they ended up having a rather fanciful argument: What would the founding fathers make of a GPS device, anyway?
To Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the question was preposterous: what would be the pre-digital version of a GPS device, he asked? An officer tucked in the undercarriage of a coach? “This would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both — not to mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience,” he noted in a footnote regarding the case, United States v. Jones.
But his partner in the argument, Justice Antonin Scalia, didn’t accept the obvious mockery: the image — “a constable’s concealing himself in the target’s coach in order to track its movements” — is “not far afield,” he wrote.
It was a bizarre enough exchange in itself. But beyond the technical details of the case, the justices were essentially grappling over a proper metaphor for digital surveillance. Some people — especially those inclined to be forgiving of new cybertools that can be used for spying — cast the issue in historical terms, seeing the connection between a smartphone and a landline, for instance, or between digital records and the paper records once kept in City Hall.
(More here.)
LAST year, two literal-minded Supreme Court justices were considering whether police officers needed a warrant before placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s S.U.V. when they ended up having a rather fanciful argument: What would the founding fathers make of a GPS device, anyway?
To Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the question was preposterous: what would be the pre-digital version of a GPS device, he asked? An officer tucked in the undercarriage of a coach? “This would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both — not to mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience,” he noted in a footnote regarding the case, United States v. Jones.
But his partner in the argument, Justice Antonin Scalia, didn’t accept the obvious mockery: the image — “a constable’s concealing himself in the target’s coach in order to track its movements” — is “not far afield,” he wrote.
It was a bizarre enough exchange in itself. But beyond the technical details of the case, the justices were essentially grappling over a proper metaphor for digital surveillance. Some people — especially those inclined to be forgiving of new cybertools that can be used for spying — cast the issue in historical terms, seeing the connection between a smartphone and a landline, for instance, or between digital records and the paper records once kept in City Hall.
(More here.)
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