

Does the Fourth Amendment cover the cloud? - profquail
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10436425-240.html

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tokenadult
"Written by David A. Couillard, a student at the University of Minnesota Law
School expected to graduate this year, the paper is a concise but thorough
outline of where we stand with respect to the application of Fourth Amendment
law to Internet computing."

One of the oddities of legal scholarship is that students who have not yet
finished their degrees edit most of the professional journals (law reviews)
and they can be published in those journals with articles (called "comments"
or "notes" by convention) that sometimes are even cited by the Supreme Court.
Kudos to this student.

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pmorici
"cases like Smith v. Maryland, in which the courts argued that people
generally gave up an expectation of privacy with regard to their phone records
simply through the act of dialing their phone"

This seems wrong, why stop at the number, one could argue that you give up
your expectation of privacy with respect to your voice and data which is
transmitted through the phone company equipment as well.

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martey
[http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&...](http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=442&page=735)

As the CNet article noted, Justice Blackmun and the 3 judges that agreed with
him thought that there was a distinction between the phone numbers the
petitioner dialed (obviously recorded by the phone company, still they would
later appear on his bill) and the contents of his conversation (not obviously
recorded, and already protected by Katz v United States).

The three dissenting judges agreed with you, but there were less of them, so
their views did not become law.

