Case Law
The campaign needs the legal path that led here.
Older doctrine, partial statutory safeguards, policy analogues, and live events explain why the proposed public-private surveillance reforms are structured the way they are.
Legal record
Cases, statutes, policy models, and events.
The model acts make more sense when visitors can see the legal and policy materials that reveal what current safeguards cover, and where the public-private infrastructure gap remains.
Katz v. United States
Established the modern reasonable-expectation-of-privacy frame that later digital surveillance cases build from.
The campaign can explain why expectations of privacy are strained when daily life is mediated by private infrastructure.
United States v. Miller
Helped form the third-party doctrine by treating bank records held by another party as outside Fourth Amendment protection.
Shows the older doctrine that commercial data access can exploit when information is held by companies.
Smith v. Maryland
Applied third-party doctrine to dialed phone numbers captured by a pen register.
Useful contrast for why persistent, aggregated, retrospective location and identity systems need new rules.
United States v. Jones
Held GPS installation on a vehicle was a search and raised concerns about prolonged location monitoring.
Supports the idea that long-term movement histories are different from isolated public observations.
Riley v. California
Required a warrant to search digital information on a seized cell phone incident to arrest.
Shows the Court recognizing that digital scale changes traditional search rules.
United States v. Warshak
Held that government violated the Fourth Amendment by compelling an email provider to turn over email contents without a warrant.
Supports the GISA theme that private custody of information should not automatically eliminate public-law process requirements.
Carpenter v. United States
Held government acquisition of historical cell-site location records was a Fourth Amendment search.
A core bridge from cell location records to other persistent location databases, including ALPR networks.
Naperville Smart Meter Awareness v. City of Naperville
The Seventh Circuit held smart-meter energy collection was a Fourth Amendment search, though reasonable on the facts.
Connects Practical Liberty and GISA to utilities and sensor data: essential-system infrastructure can expose intimate household patterns.
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department
The en banc Fourth Circuit held Baltimore aerial surveillance violated the Fourth Amendment by enabling persistent tracking of movements.
Shows how scale, aggregation, and retrospective search can transform ordinary public movement observation into a constitutional problem.
United States v. Smith
The Fifth Circuit held the geofence warrant before it unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
Direct support for the Public Power report's concern with reverse searches that start from a place or event and work backward to people.
Chatrie v. United States
Supreme Court decision addressing geofence warrants and provider-held location data.
Directly supports explaining reverse searching, third-party providers, and constitutional limits on digital dragnet tools.
State-action doctrine cases
Cases such as Lugar, Blum, Rendell-Baker, Brentwood, and Halleck limit when private actors are treated as the state.
Explains why the campaign uses statutory reform instead of claiming every vendor is automatically a state actor.
Privacy Act of 1974
Provides federal system notices, access, amendment, disclosure accounting, and purpose constraints.
A partial domestic precedent for GISA, but not enough for shared cloud platforms, AI lineage, and cross-jurisdiction vendor networks.
Stored Communications Act / ECPA
Regulates certain provider disclosures to government based on data category and legal process.
Supports legal-process parity: government should not use purchase or API access to bypass direct-compulsion rules.
Driver’s Privacy Protection Act
Restricts disclosure and redisclosure of state motor vehicle record information through enumerated permissible uses.
Useful statutory analogy for limiting movement and reuse of vehicle-linked information.
Fair Credit Reporting Act
Regulates private information intermediaries through permissible purposes, accuracy duties, dispute rights, and user obligations.
Strong analogy for regulating surveillance databases that materially affect government or private decisions.
FTC v. Kochava
FTC alleged sale of sensitive geolocation data could reveal visits to clinics, worship sites, shelters, and recovery facilities.
Supplies a data-broker enforcement analogue for sensitive-location restrictions, deletion duties, and consent limits.
FTC Mobilewalla sensitive-location order
FTC restricted sale and use of sensitive location data where consent and sensitive-location safeguards were allegedly inadequate.
Supports treating broker supply chains as part of the public-private infrastructure problem when government can buy or receive the data.
ACLU v. Clearview AI
Settlement restricted Clearview access in Illinois and addressed a private face-search database used by law enforcement.
Provides a biometric example parallel to ALPR and geofence tools: private collection becomes searchable public investigative capability.
CJIS Security Policy
Shows government already imposes shared security and audit requirements across public and private handlers of criminal justice information.
GISA can borrow this cross-entity compliance architecture while adding substantive purpose, movement, and retention limits.
Federal Records Act and NARA electronic records rules
Organizes government record duties around capture, maintenance, transfer, metadata, retention, and disposition.
Provides a lifecycle model for information stewardship, though existing rules focus more on government accountability than individual redress.
Illinois ALPR abortion and immigration restrictions
Illinois restricted ALPR sharing for out-of-state abortion and immigration enforcement, then investigated alleged violations.
Shows why state-law modules and cross-jurisdiction enforcement safeguards matter.
Ring Request for Assistance shutdown
Ring stopped facilitating direct police requests for user footage through the Neighbors app after years of privacy criticism.
Shows product architecture and platform policy can determine whether residential camera networks become government-access infrastructure.
Chicago OIG ShotSpotter review
Chicago OIG found responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produced documented evidence of gun-related crime and changed police behavior.
Supports audit, accuracy, corroboration, documentation, and downstream-use limits for vendor-generated investigative alerts.
Norfolk Flock ALPR litigation
A constitutional challenge tested whether a dense city ALPR network violates Fourth Amendment protections.
Lets the site show live litigation pressure and explain the gap between constitutional claims and statutory safeguards.
Practical Liberty in Essential Systems Act framework
Supplies a limiting test for when private control over essential systems makes basic liberties practically unavailable.
Broadens the campaign from surveillance infrastructure to housing, healthcare, digital platforms, finance, employment, transportation, utilities, and ecological systems.
Institutional Integrity and Regulatory Accountability Act framework
Defines systemic integrity failure as a reviewable institutional condition without confusing it with ordinary policy disagreement or criminal corruption.
Explains why public decisions, nondecisions, conflicts, waivers, procurement, mergers, subsidies, and nonenforcement can create or preserve liberty-impairing systems.