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VOA VIEW -- Is the opinion of "Voice of Americans", which is a private entity not affiliated in any way with the United States government or any of its agencies. The opinions expressed here, in whatever medium or format, are not necessarily the opinions of the ownership or advertisers of this web site - 0415.

     Advocates for government surveillance often argue that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.  It should all be stopped.

     I’m sure Jack Smith, the special counsel President Joe Biden appointed to do whatever it takes to bring down Donald Trump, took solace in that bromide as he rifled through the personal data of 10 members of Congress, illegally attempting lawfare to implicate these elected officials in some contrived insurrection.  Arctic Frost is the chilly name the FBI gave its unconstitutional fishing expedition.  

     How could such an abuse of power occur in a nation famous for its protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, enshrined in the Fourth Amendment?  Well, the story of government’s abuse of search-and-seizure power is long — and in the modern era, it largely begins with litigation concerning the privacy of one’s phone.  Justice Louis Brandeis dissented, famously writing that our Founders “conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.

     “To protect that right,” Brandeis continued, “every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.”  In Katz v. United States, the justices ruled that the Fourth Amendment includes an expectation of privacy in the content of one’s calls, and that a physical intrusion was unnecessary to claim its protections.

     Yet in the 1979 case Smith v. Maryland, the court ruled that Americans can claim no legitimate expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial, because that information is shared with the phone company.  As Justice Thurgood Marshall presciently warned in his dissent, “Unless a person is prepared to forgo use of what for many has become a personal or professional necessity, he cannot help but accept the risk of surveillance.”  When the cell phone era arrived, government spooks discovered a treasure trove of information could be gleaned from the metadata associated with phone calls.