This Needs Fixin'

The 4th Amendment to the U.S. constitution says:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

There’s one really obvious problem with this.

Who gets to define “unreasonable”?

The dominant political class, that’s who.

But that’s a normal legal problem, and issues of definition aren’t really avoidable (though they can be minimized).

The major issue with this is historical: when it was written they had no idea, and really could not have anticipated, that one day there would be an entire industry dedicated to collecting as much data as possible on everyone and selling it to anyone with a few bucks and a hard drive.

And now, all the information the State could possibly want is available on the cheap.

To put it into the 4th Amendment’s terms, anyone who wants to can buy whatever information they want to look through on everyone’s:

• persons (FitBit, Apple Watch)
• houses (Roomba, Alexa, Siri, Ring)
• papers (GMail, Messages, any credit card)
• and effects (AirTag, any cell phone)

(Those are just some example data sources for each category; there are lots and lots more.)

So now the State can get whatever data it wants without coming near the 4th Amendment.

And that is … less than ideal.

The point of the prohibition is not to avoid inconveniencing the individual by the act of collecting the data; the point is to keep the State from having that data without a damn good reason.

So this really, really needs to be dealt with.

We could, and should, regulate (or just forbid) collecting and transferring personal data.

That is a broader solution, and much more complicated than a solution to just the State having this data needs to be.

To address just the State issue, we need (in addition to a ban on the State sub-contracting out its work) a ban on the State purchasing or otherwise acquiring data unless it meets the same requirements it would have to meet to go out and collect the data itself.

Don’t blame the founders for this one.

Yeah, the Constitution is badly flawed on this issue, but there’s no way they could have anticipated that we’d let an industry like this grow up unchecked.

This one’s all on us.

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