The C harlotte-Mecklenburg police department conducts regular cellphone and laptop device surveillance on Charlotte citizens — and has done so for eight years now, according to The Charlotte Observer. The American Civil Liberties Union has said it suspects other N.C. cities have acted similarly.
The lack of transparency regarding the use of such equipment threatens the basic constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Federal law does not require a warrant for metadata surveillance, but the state’s legislators should.
Police have recorded the location of devices and serial numbers from perpetrators and innocent people alike. Charlotte’s police claim there is no content surveillance and that metadata isn’t stored.
Mecklenburg Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Richard Boner estimates he has approved hundreds of requests to use the equipment and has never turned down one request, according to the Charlotte Observer. Such blanket permissiveness is cause for concern.
Police departments are federally barred from disclosing information about surveillance practices. The U.S. Department of Justice has reasoned that such information is already available to service providers and therefore is not legally considered “search and seizure,” citing the 1979 supreme court case Smith v. Maryland.
This argument is dated and undemocratic. By the same logic, the government could conceivably justify screening information given to a physician, an employer or posted to Facebook, simply because it is voluntarily given to a third party.
Such practices make one wonder why the government should be given such transparency into our lives if the favor is not returned.
