It’s been quite a week for the 4th amendment.
First, the Supreme Court ruled that police are allowed to take DNA samples after an arrest, even if the individual has not yet been charged.
Then, The Guardian blew the whistle on a secret FISA order to Verizon that allows the NSA daily access to metadata for all calls made in the U.S. and abroad on Verizon’s network. The data includes the sending and receiving phone number, unique customer identifier, time of the call, duration of the call, and if the call was placed on a cell phone, location data. It is likely that every major phone carrier has received a similar order.
Then, to top it all off, The Guardian and The Washington Post simultaneously revealed the existence of a secret NSA program, dubbed “PRISM”, that allegedly collects user data from some of the top tech companies in the U.S., including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook.
Both the NSA and the aforementioned tech companies have vehemently denied that user data is being collected via “direct access”, but the existence of PRISM has been confirmed by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.