Britain has implemented an extensive video surveillance system called Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), with over 4 million cameras watching over public areas. The purpose of the cameras is for officials in monitoring centers to watch for suspicious behavior and dispatch the police if they see crime developing. CCTV footage has also been used to investigate crimes. For more about CCTV, see this great article by my colleague, Jeffrey Rosen.
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As there are tons of new scholarly works in the privacy law field each year, I thought it might be useful to point out a few books and articles that I found particularly interesting and useful from the past year. This post will cover only those books and articles published in 2006.
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A bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Free Flow of Information Act, endeavors to create a federal privilege for journalists — a shield from being forced to identify anonymous sources. According to a Washington Post editorial in support of the bill:
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A while back, it was reported that the Bush Administration authorized the NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping. Based on the information released so far, the program was likely illegal. Now, it appears that the warrantless wiretapping program (more innocuously renamed the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” or “TSP”) is just the tip of a larger iceberg.
From the New York Times:
Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.
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Every term, commentators attempt to predict the outcomes of the cases in the Supreme Court docket. The statistics, however, suggest that the betting person’s answer should be reversal.
EFF has obtained a big bunch of documents from the FBI via the Freedom of Information Act pertaining to its surveillance abuses. From the EFF announcement:
In an earlier post, I discussed some of the constitutional issues involved in ACLU v. NSA, –F.3d — (6th Cir. 2007). In this case, a panel from the 6th Circuit concluded that the ACLU and other plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The program is known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP).
Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy in email headers and IP addresses under the Fourth Amendment? No, sayeth the 9th Circuit in US v. Forrester:
