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Essay
75.1

Government Data Mining and the Fourth Amendment

Christopher Slobogin
Stephen C. O’Connell Professor of Law, University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law

The author would like to thank participants in workshops at Stanford Law School and Florida Law School for their feedback on the content of this article, and Victoria Ianni for her research assistance. This paper is a version of a talk given at The University of Chicago Law School’s Surveillance Symposium, June 15–16, 2007.

The government’s ability to obtain and analyze recorded information about its citizens through the process known as data mining has expanded enormously over the past decade. Since at least the mid1990s, the quantity of the world’s recorded data has doubled every year. At the same time, the computing power necessary to store, access, and analyze these data has increased geometrically, at increasingly cheaper cost. Governments that want to know about their subjects would be foolish not to take advantage of this situation, and federal and state bodies in this country have done so with alacrity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
    Fourth Amendment Privacy Technology