How does the 4th amendment protect privacy rights

Terry v. Ohio, U. Dickerson , U. School officials need not obtain a warrant before searching a student who is under their authority; rather, a search of a student need only be reasonable under all the circumstances. New Jersey v. TLO , U. Where there is probable cause to believe that a vehicle contains evidence of a criminal activity, an officer may lawfully search any area of the vehicle in which the evidence might be found. Arizona v. Gant , S.

An officer may conduct a traffic stop if he has reasonable suspicion that a traffic violation has occurred or that criminal activity is afoot. Berekmer v. McCarty , U. Arvizu , U. No excessive force shall be used. Reasonableness is the ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a search or seizure. Searches and seizures with the warrant must also satisfy the reasonableness requirement.

On the other hand, warrantless searches and seizures are presumed to be unreasonable , unless they fall within the few exceptions. The court will examine the totality of the circumstances to determine if the search or seizure was justified. When analyzing the reasonableness standard, the court uses an objective assessment and considers factors including the degree of intrusion by the search or seizure and the manner in which the search or seizure is conducted.

Under the exclusionary rule , any evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment will be excluded from criminal proceedings. There are a few exceptions to this rule.

In recent years, the Fourth Amendment's applicability in electronic searches and seizures has received much attention from the courts. With the advent of the internet and increased popularity of computers, there has been an increasing amount of crime occurring electronically. Consequently, evidence of such crime can often be found on computers, hard drives, or other electronic devices.

The Fourth Amendment applies to the search and seizure of electronic devices. Many electronic search cases involve whether law enforcement can search a company-owned computer that an employee uses to conduct business. Although the case law is split, the majority holds that employees do not have a legitimate expectation of privacy with regard to information stored on a company-owned computer.

In the case of City of Ontario v. Quon , the Supreme Court extended this lack of an expectation of privacy to text messages sent and received on an employer-owned pager. Lately, electronic surveillance and wiretapping has also caused a significant amount of Fourth Amendment litigation.

One provision permits law enforcement to obtain access to stored voicemails by obtaining a basic search warrant rather than a surveillance warrant. Obtaining a basic search warrant requires a much lower evidentiary showing. A highly controversial provision of the Act includes permission for law enforcement to use sneak-and-peak warrants.

In an Oregon federal district court case that drew national attention, Judge Ann Aiken struck down the use of sneak-and-peak warrants as unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment. See F. An NSL is an administrative subpoena that requires certain persons, groups, organizations, or companies to provide documents about certain persons. The flip side is that the Fourth Amendment does permit searches and seizures that are reasonable. In practice, this means that the police may override your privacy concerns and conduct a search of you, your home, barn, car, boat, office, personal or business documents, bank account records, trash barrel, or whatever, if:.

The Fourth Amendment applies to a search only if a person has a "legitimate expectation of privacy" in the place or thing searched. If not, the amendment offers no protection because there are, by definition, no privacy issues. Courts generally use a two-part test fashioned by the U. Supreme Court to determine whether, at the time of the search, a defendant had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the place or things searched:.

For example, a person who uses a public restroom expects not to be spied upon the person has an expectation of privacy , and most people—including judges—would consider that expectation to be objectively reasonable. Therefore, the installation of a hidden video camera by the police in a public restroom would be considered a "search" and would be subject to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonableness.

On the other hand, if an officer stops a car and, when talking to the driver, happens to notice a weapon on the passenger seat, there's been no search under the Fourth Amendment. That's because, even if the driver somehow considered the passenger seat to be a private place, society isn't willing to extend privacy protections to that particular location. In other words, there's no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to the gun because it was in plain view.

A good example of how this works comes from a U. Supreme Court case in which the court held that a bus passenger had a legitimate expectation of privacy in an opaque carry-on bag positioned in a luggage rack above the passenger's head. The Court held that the physical probing by the police of the bag's exterior for evidence of contraband constituted a search subject to Fourth Amendment limitations. Bond v. Private security personnel have at times outnumbered police officers in the United States by three to one.

As a result, whether you're shopping in a supermarket or a pharmacy, working in an office building, or visiting a friend in a housing project, you might be more likely to be confronted by a security guard than by a police officer.

The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to searches carried out by non-governmental employees like private security guards who aren't acting on the government's behalf. For example, assume that a shopping mall security guard acting on a pure hunch searches a teenager's backpack.

Inside the backpack, the guard finds a baggie containing an illegal drug. The guard can detain the teenager, call the police, and turn the drug over to a police officer. This paper describes how the U. United States has the potential to usher in a new era of Fourth Amendment law. In Carpenter , the Court considered how the Fourth Amendment applies to location data generated when cell phones connect to nearby cell towers.

United States, S. The decision sits at the intersection of two lines of cases: those that examine location tracking technologies, like beepers or the Global Positioning System GPS , and those that discuss what expectation of privacy is reasonable for information disclosed to third parties, like banks or phone companies.

In reaching its conclusion that a warrant was required, the Court upended existing precedent, ruling for the first time that location information maintained by a third party was protected by the Fourth Amendment.