This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 19th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How should state governments protect people from governmental prying eyes?

It doesn't make it easier in a world where police departments have access to the

latest spy gadgets with relatively light oversight. During the Kido

Institute's Constitution Day festivities, I spoke with Jonathan Howin Child of the American

Legislative Exchange Council about how states can make better use of frameworks to

protect privacy.

Seruce Farovar wrote a pretty darn good book called habeas data and in that he sort of details sort of the frustrating way that courts are routinely caught flat-footed when it comes to trying to enforce

constitutional protections against government intrusion in the field of

technology because technology moves very quickly and courts are often dealing with cases that are you know years old and trying to come up with some sort of rule or recognition of how rights ought to be applied in particular

circumstances for states and federal lawmakers and policymakers who want to advance a robust conception of liberty

and the little slightly fuzzier concept of privacy.

What should they be doing?

Well, they really should be looking at providing the court's

frameworks.

One of the problems that we do have is either general principles,

or we have very specific laws that are outdated. And the courts are left trying to reason, especially from the

outdated laws, trying to reason and apply those to today's expectations of privacy, to today's technology.

One of the principal examples I tend to give is the Stored Communications Act, which allows law enforcement to access emails that are

older than six months with nothing more than a subpoena. No weren't required.

That was passed in 1986. In 1986 people didn't have email addresses like they do today.

...