This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, June 30, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Courts have had a hard time keeping up with changes in technology, the changes in how police departments have made use of personal

data without a warrant.

In his new book, habeas data, Seru's Farovar provides a history of how courts have dealt with

technology and privacy we spoke earlier

this month. In going through your book it seems that there's this key moment

when it comes to protecting the privacy of Americans, where we move essentially from, you know,

papers and effects where the stuff is is printed or written down. and the

technology doesn't exist and we move into a digital world

and a whole lot of what we ought to think about as protections extending to these other effects

and these other bits of data that we now send for in these far-flung places that those protections just didn't come along.

And judges have been sort of slow, it seems to reckon with the idea that this is how we live and that at least some of those protections really ought to be maintained.

So can you walk me through some of the background here where you think were some key turning

points and where we lost something with regard to protection of our

information and privacy? Yeah, so yeah in the book I talk about 10 Supreme Court cases, mostly Supreme Court cases, that look at this kind of question.

And this is actually a kind of a very old question that you're referring to, right?

I was sort of fascinated to learn, and I talk about this briefly in the book,

that in the early days of the 20th century in the 1920s, almost 100 years ago in the prohibition

era, there was this case out of Seattle that goes by the name of Olmstead.

And Olmstead, it was a former Seattle police officer turned bootlegger and he was running

liquor all over the northwest and the federal government came after him as it was illegal at the time

...