"There goes the Fourth Amendment...or what's left of it."
--Carla Dean (Enemy of the State)
Last Friday's Blue Bloods episode included a scene where a waiter secretly videotapes a conversation Henry Reagan is having with an old friend, and then posts it on the YouTube. Because the conversation includes some politically incorrect anecdotes, the elder Reagan is later chastised by the NYPD PR guy for his lose lips in a public place.
Henry countered that what was done amounted to an illegal wire tap--invasion of a private conversation.
He's right. Technological advances do not give an individual the right to peer into (and share) a conversation between two people that is meant to be private--even if that conversation is held in a public place. No different than tapping phones or peeping Toms.
This is a fourth amendment issue. Convict one YouTube poster (or one NSA agent) and info tech becomes less harmful and more helpful.
The right of all individuals to be secure in the person and possessions is insecure until then.
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For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.
~Justice Potter Stewart, Katz v. United States (1967) U.S. Supreme Court
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