Police, Process, and Privacy

Policymakers — state and federal, legislative and judicial — have expressed their interest in updating the laws regarding electronic surveillance. This interest is motivated by several recent trends. First, law enforcement surveillance has traditionally been limited as much by practical considerations, including the costs and technical difficulty of obtaining evidence, as legal ones. However, technological innovations have undermined these traditional practical protections, raising questions about the adequacy of the legal protections that remain. Second, law enforcement agencies are no longer the only entities collecting information about individuals. A wide variety of commercial entities now collect information about their customers, which law enforcement can access with only minimal legal protections. However, attempts to update electronic surveillance laws are made more difficult by the fact that very little is currently known about how law enforcement officers use electronic surveillance and commercial information requests. This dissertation presents the results of three studies that investigate how law enforcement uses electronic surveillance.