The Importance Of The Fourth Amendment

" In the past decade the use of the internet has increased exponentially in everyday life. We see the use of internet and media a lot in the United States now. All this new technology has made it almost effortless for someone to get access to the web. However in recent years the internet has been the center of intense controversies, one being “to what extent in the U.S. does the federal, state, and local government have the duty to monitor internet content?”. Many may say the the government should do more to monitor the internet, but I however strongly disagree. We have the First and Fourth Amendments in place to protect us from the government in America, and the same should be applied online too. On December 15, 1791, the
Although this Amendment was created before modern technology, the Fourth Amendment still should be applied to the world as well. A recent case that relates to the Fourth Amendment, and one that the Supreme Court has debated over, is Carpenter v. United States. According www.Oyez.org, the case centered around this question: “Does the warrantless search and seizure of cell phone records, which include the location and movements of cell phone users, violate the Fourth Amendment?” During the case’s oral argument on November 29, 2017, the Supreme Court Justices made some good points against the respondent Michael R. Dreeben. For example when Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated, “The Constitution has always said government can't intrude, except in some carefully defined situations, special needs being foremost among them -- can't intrude on those privacy interests without a warrant. We're not saying they can't ever. They've just got to have articulable facts based on reliable information, sworn to in an affidavit, that can provide probable cause to believe that this individual is involved in criminal activity.
We have a right to believe in what we want and say what we want without the government limiting it, but if the government monitors the content we post online, the First Amendment rights we have would be very much at risk of being violated. The first time the Supreme Court heard a case dealing with First Amendment protections and how they apply to the Internet was Elonis v. United States. According to the article The Supreme Court case that could kill online free speech — or curb online harassment, the case revolved around a Pennsylvania man, Anthony Elonis, who posted several violent comments on Facebook in 2010 stating that he wanted to kill his ex-wife for leaving him and taking their children with her. He was convicted and sentenced to 44 months in prison on four counts of “making threats.” Now, Elonis is before the Supreme Court arguing that his threats should not have been taken seriously, as they were just made online, and did not constitute “true threats”. This case really made people start to think whether government should have any power to determine what we can or can't say on the internet, because this can be an overstretch by the government on our First Amendment