“Pen Registers” Not a Search: “Smith v. Maryland”
The Supreme Court ruled on this day, in Smith v. Maryland, that the installation of a “pen register” is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
A pen register is an electronic device that records the phone numbers of all calls made from a telephone number, but does not record the content of the phone conversation.
Pen registers represent an older technology, as the issue in the surveillance communications now focuses on “metadata” analyses of internet traffic. Metadata records the address destination of emails without recording the content of the messages. The Smith decision became extremely important in 2013 when the U.S. government used it to justify the spying policies of the National Security Agency (NSA).
The National Security Agency began operations on November 4, 1952 and remained a secret agency for twenty three years. The joke among Washington “insiders” was the acronym NSA stood for “no such agency.” The public did not become aware of the NSA and its activities until the Senate Church Committee investigation, when for the first time the NSA director testified publicly before the committee.
Learn more: Stephen Schulhofer, More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (2012)
Learn more about pen registers: http://www.tdcaa.com/node/4813
And more: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Pen+Register