The U.S. Government

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Our Nation Explained In A Way We All Can Understand

Because democracy only works when we understand it

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A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer operates an NEC biometric facial-recognition kiosk at a United Airlines international departure gate in Houston, processing a seated traveler whose face is photographed and matched against government records before boarding.
Civics

Privacy & Government Surveillance

The Fourth Amendment bars unreasonable searches, but it was written for houses and papers, not license plate readers, cell-site simulators, face recognition, and data brokers. Here is the line of Supreme Court cases from Olmstead to Carpenter, how people are actually tracked today, what is and is not true about phones listening, the loopholes that skip the warrant requirement, and what pushes back.

1791 to the presentSourced to the Supreme Court, the GAO, the FTC, the ODNI, and the ACLU and EFF

A 1791 Rule Against a 21st-Century Problem

The Fourth Amendment was written to stop British officers from ransacking colonial homes with open-ended warrants. It restrains the government, not private companies, and for its first 140 years courts read it to cover only physical intrusion on physical property. Every case below is a court or a Congress deciding whether a new way of watching people counts as a search that needs a warrant, or something the government may do freely.

The west facade of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., where cases from Olmstead in 1928 to Carpenter in 2018 defined how the Fourth Amendment applies to electronic surveillance.

The Supreme Court has redrawn the line between lawful surveillance and an unconstitutional search at least four times since 1928, usually years after the technology in question was already in widespread use.

Sources & Further Reading

This page draws on published Supreme Court opinions and Oyez case summaries, the Government Accountability Office's 2021 review of federal face-recognition use, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's declassified report on commercially available information, Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions and orders, a 2023 Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's surveillance-tracking projects, Northeastern University's Panoptispy study, congressional records for the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and the reauthorization of Section 702, and contemporaneous reporting by the Associated Press, The Markup, and 404 Media. Company figures for Flock Safety, Clearview AI, and Google geofence-request volume are the companies' own disclosed numbers as reported at the time of writing.

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