The Volokh Conspiracy - Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet: A General Approach

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The Volokh Conspiracy — Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet: A General Approach:

This arti­cle offers a gen­eral frame­work for apply­ing the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will seek a technology-​​neutral trans­la­tion of Fourth Amendment prin­ci­ples from phys­i­cal space to cyber­space, and it con­sid­ers what new dis­tinc­tions in the online set­ting can reflect the func­tion of Fourth Amendment pro­tec­tions designed for the phys­i­cal world. It reaches two major con­clu­sions. First, the tra­di­tional phys­i­cal dis­tinc­tion between inside and out­side should be replaced with the online dis­tinc­tion between con­tent and non-​​content infor­ma­tion. Second, courts should require a search war­rant that is par­tic­u­lar­ized to indi­vid­u­als rather than Internet accounts to col­lect the con­tents of pro­tected Internet com­mu­ni­ca­tions. These two prin­ci­ples point the way to a technology-​​neutral trans­la­tion of the Fourth Amendment from phys­i­cal space to cyberspace.