Does the Fourth Amendment Block Cops from Using Artificial Intelligence? The Crime Report

The Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures could prevent law enforcement from applying increasingly sophisticated surveillance and predictive policing technology, including "superhuman" methods employing artificial intelligence, according to a professor at the University of California-Davis School of Law. In an essay published in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Elizabeth E. Joh argues that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v United States established a precedent for using the Fourth Amendment to limit the use of emerging technology, ranging from drones that help patrol borders to predictive-analytic software that can determine when and where the next crime will occur. In that landmark case, decided this summer, the Court ruled law enforcement cannot access citizens' cellphone location records without a search warrant. Although the decision focused on whether information held by "third parties" such as cellphone providers was subject to privacy protections guaranteed under the Constitution, Joh said it also touched on the changing "nature of policing" specifically the technologically enhanced means law enforcement can now exploit to gather information in the cyber era. In the Carpenter case, justices were asked to rule on whether FBI agents sidestepped their constitutional obligations to show "probable cause" for obtaining a search warrant to retrieve the locational data of a suspected serial robber's cellphone to prove he was near the scene of stores in the Detroit area where thefts had occurred.