Affecting Eternity: The Court\u27s Confused Lesson in Board of Education v. Earls

In Board of Education v. Earls, the US. Supreme Court found the random drug testing of schoolchildren who participated in extracurricular activities to be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. In this Article, Professor Dery argues that this latest extension of the special needs doctrine is both patronizing to student privacy interests and inconsistent with the Court\u27s previous limitation of suspicionless searches in New Jersey v. T.L.O. and Chandler v. Miller. Professor Dery criticizes the Court\u27s Earls decision as a confused lesson in constitutional law, abandoning the very fundamentals of the Fourth Amendment

The Loss of Privacy Is Just a Heartbeat Away: An Exploration of Government Heartbeat Detection Technology and Its Impact on Fourth Amendment Protections

The Department of Energy has developed the Enclosed Space Detection System (ESDS), a search tool that enables officials to identify persons hidden inside vehicles at certain sensitive sites, such as nuclear facilities. ESDS operates by measuring the movements in vehicles generated by the beating of an occupant\u27s heart. This Article considers the Fourth Amendment privacy implications caused by the advent of a technology so advanced that it can probe all the way to one\u27s heart. Specifically, this Article critically examines the Supreme Court\u27s Fourth Amendment precedent concerning the definition of a search and the application of the special needs doctrine to assess the impact of the heartbeat detector on privacy

Trading Privacy for Promotion? Fourth Amendment Implications of Employers Using Wearable Sensors to Assess Worker Performance

This Article considers the Fourth Amendment implications of a study on a passive monitoring system where employees shared data from wearables, phone applications, and position beacons that provided private information such as weekend phone use, sleep patterns in the bedroom, and emotional states. The study’s authors hope to use the data collected to create a new system for objectively assessing employee performance that will replace the current system which is plagued by the inherent bias of self-reporting and peer-review and which is labor intensive and inefficient. The researchers were able to successfully link the data collected with the quality of worker performance. This technological advance raises the prospect of law enforcement gaining access to sensitive information from employers for use in criminal investigations. This Article analyzes the Fourth Amendment issues raised by police access to this new technology. Although the Supreme Court currently finds government collection of a comprehensive chronicle of a person’s life to constitute a Fourth Amendment search, widespread employee acceptance of mobile sensing could undermine any claim in having a reasonable expectation of privacy in such information. Additionally, employee tolerance of passive monitoring could make employer data available to the government through third party consent. When previously assessing employees’ privacy, the Court demonstrated a willingness to accept the needs of the employer and society as justification for limiting workers’ Fourth Amendment rights. Ultimately, then, Court precedent suggests that passive monitoring could erode Fourth Amendment rights in the long term