It’s Too Complicated: How the Internet

Upends Katz, Smith, And Electronic Surveillance Law

The Internet, a great disrupter in so many ways, challenges bedrock assumptions on which several principles of modern surveillance law rest. The network’s open and dynamic architecture creates a communication environment where an individual unit of data may change its status — from content to non-content or vice versa — as it travels across the Internet’s layered structures from sender to recipient. The unstable, transient status of data traversing the Internet is compounded by the fact that the content or non-content status of any individual unit of data may also depend upon where in the network that unit resides when the question is asked. In this digitized…

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