| > It's pretty hard to square the alleged seizure of all privately transmitted data with the Fourth Amendment. "Seizure" would imply the government taking custody of something away from the owner, which is not what's going on during a bitcopy. Search is closer, but you missed noticing one of the most important words: " ...against unreasonable searches and seizures". In other words if the search can be construed "reasonable" for any reason (which is very much a "judgment call") then it is automatically Constitutional (even if it's not automatically legal, which can be a separate consideration). Additionally the NSA is not seizing all privately transmitted data (which is in any event physically impossible). Either they have to be selective about what metadata is retained long-term, or they have to buffer everything but only for a short term in which case they are acting very much like a "common carrier" with an exceptionally bad problem of bufferbloat. But either way, there's another problem: The data being "searched" isn't your data, it's someone else's data (at a different ISP or host) that happens to be bit-for-bit identical to the data you transmitted, which means any 4th Amendment claim would be theirs to make, not yours. So I would be careful about how strictly you try to read into the Fourth Amendment, as only the "judicial activist" interpretations of it would possibly exclude electronic surveillance of the type now done by NSA. |