NSA Metadata Collection and the Fourth Amendment
The Snowden disclosures have sparked public controversy and provoked constitutional challenges in federal courts. This Note aims to contribute to that debate in two ways. First, it collects information scattered across numerous government documents — some of which Edward Snowden has disclosed, others of which the government has declassified — to tell the story of the NSA’s telephony metadata collection program since September 11, 2001. Second, it assesses the government’s argument that call record data lacks protection under the Fourth Amendment. In particular, this Note asks whether the NSA’s prolonged collection of telephony metadata is consistent with Fourth Amendment doctrine in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in United States v. Jones, in which the Court raised serious doubts about the constitutionality of unfettered metadata collection and analysis.
A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls and Potential of the Mosaic Theory of Fourth Amendment Privacy
On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and explores the mosaic theory and concludes that it exposes an important quantitative dimension of Fourth Amendment privacy but raises serious practical challenges, which, as we argue elsewhere, can be met by regulating surveillance technologies capable of facilitating broad programs of indiscriminate surveillance.
School Principals and Education Law: What do they know, what do they need to know?
Principals now work in complex and challenging environments where uncertainty and change are the hallmarks of their roles and responsibilities. As such, the knowledge and capability demands on principals have expanded, including those related to education law. While these matters attracted some research interest a number of years ago, there has been little recent work in the area of principals and education law. This article reports on an exploratory study into aspects of the legal knowledge held by Tasmanian government school principals, particularly concerning non-sexual physical contact between teachers and students. The research was undertaken using a small-scale, mixed-methods research design, which required principals to respond to various legal scenarios. Three key findings emerged from the study. First, principals used two different levels of working knowledge about education law  one related to legal problems, and the other to legally-related routine activities. Second, on the particular topic of physical contact, some knowledge held by principals was not legally accurate. Third, for major legal issues, participants indicated that they acquired access to information from legal experts. The situation for routine legal matters was less clear, although in-service training and practical experience were identified as potential sources of knowledge. Participants recognised the importance of a sound knowledge of education law, especially for dealing with security and safety issues and preferred to access further information through in-service training. Notably, the findings of the study are broadly consistent with those from earlier Australian and international research, suggesting that much remains to be done in the area of principals’ education law knowledge.