Argumentative Essay: Is Technology Testing The Fourth Amendment?

Is technology testing the Fourth Amendment? With all the new technology, police are now using devices that could potentially “see through walls”. They are also using other search techniques such as wiretapping to conduct searches rather than a “physical search” and by doing so; they can “legally” avoid violating the Fourth Amendment. A lot of the Fourth Amendment has also been weakened significantly over the years from Federal Court Case and the new technology.
The fourth Amendment is “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things
to be seized.” The amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. From the day the Fourth Amendment was made to today, a lot of the protection it once gave has been stripped away. The Supreme Court has been able to twist what the word "unreasonable" means. Old words that once defined our Bill of Rights have been twisted in new ways that may not have meant what they originally meant when the Bill of Rights was originally made. This also means " Previously unreasonable searches become reasonable ones under new government interpretations of the Fourth Amendment." An example of this is in a recent Supreme Court Case, Kentucky v. King 2011, where the court ruled 8-1 that " the police may forcibly enter your home without a search warrant as long as they believe someone inside is trying to destroy evidence."
When it comes to the global internet, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t really apply.
Everything is now online, from banking to travel to social media. From the creation of these things, the NSA has also created new possibilities of following you and intruding in your life. For example, The NSA is now allowed to collect images and videos and subject them to facial recognition that is able to put a name to almost any face. There were laws that once prevented the NSA from accessing private company info but large companies have now allowed the government to access this information. The incorporation of better cameras and fingerprinting onto smartphones has also allowed the NSA to put unique biological traits to a person for identification. This is called biometrics. One of the worlds largest know biometric collections belongs to the department of the state. It is believed to have over 75 million photographs of Americans and foreigners with a growing rate of over 35,000 photographs per day. With all these records, the NSA and other agencies are developing ways of storing the data. Such storage is cheap and has wiped out the era of old clunky file cabinets and the use of
disks.