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" BU Today has an intriguing interview today with Tracey Maclin, a professor at the Boston University School Of Law and a Fourth Amendment scholar. (Here&amp;#039;s an interview with Maclin that Orin Kerr at SCOTUSBlog did on the occasion of the publication of Maclin&amp;#039;s study of the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Exclusionary Rule. That relationship is not exactly a field of buttercups, as you can imagine.) Maclin makes one point that I&amp;#039;d like to crowd-source to the actual lawyers in the peanut gallery to tell me if he&amp;#039;s right, because it seems to me to be both correct, and nifty little constitutional fig-leaf for timorous federal judges to hide behind if a case on this whole business ever lands in their laps. When you send an email, it goes to the internet service provider, or if you send out communications through Facebook or other social media, those communications have to go somewhere and then get transmitted to the people you want to send them to. A good argument can be made that you don&amp;#039;t have any constitutional protection with respect to those communications, because that information is no longer private. That&amp;#039;s US constitutional law that many people don&amp;#039;t understand.  I hadn&amp;#039;t considered the &amp;quot;intermediary&amp;quot; capacity of the ISP&amp;#039;s and the social media to undermine the personal privacy protections of the individuals who avail themselves of their services. (I got stuck on the whole notion of their selling the data, and not that the simple act of using them at all would be enough to erase the constitutional protections.) I think if any judge who likes the whole new world of surveillance, or one who simply chooses not to stand up against it, wants one, they&amp;#039;ve got their loophole. I think almost every politician who thinks the surveillance state is dandy -- Hi, Dianne! -- has another argument. But I only play a constitutional scholar on the blog. Take it away, counselors. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18740/intermediaries-and-civil-liberties/>