Rather an obscure case relating to the 4th and 5th amendments to the US constitution was decided by the Supreme Court yesterday.

It about someone having a row in a truck with his daughter, who was stopped by the police (who had been tipped off about the row) and refusing to give his name to the officer who requested it. He was prosecuted and fined $250. Technically what was under scrutiny was the man's right not to incriminate himself (5th) and his right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure (4th). Plus, presumably his right to remain silent. The court decided 5-4 against the man's assertion of his right to remain silent in the circumstances.

Michael Froomkin briefly looks at the technicalities. Apparently it's quite a narrowly tailored decision which need not necessarily have wider implications than the specific case (though Froomkin suggests it might be a slippery slope).

Under a 1968 Supreme Court decision police are allowed to hold someone briefly (called a "Terry stop" after the case) in order to obtain more information, which seems fair enough. The thing that interested me about this particular case, though, is not the specific technicalities but the question of latent ambiguity. Presumably the justices in 1968 had an idea in their heads about the kind of information that an officer could find out about an individual during a brief detention. It would be fairly limited e.g. any parking tickets, was the vehicle stolen, did he match a suspect's description, was someone of that name wanted etc. 36 years on, however, with vasts amounts of information on everybody collected in public and private and networked databases makes the kind of information it is possible to find out about an individual, in a short space of time, qualitatively of a completely different order.

Should not the modern day justices be exploring the boundaries of the information it should be possible to find out? The decision doesn't affect us directly this side of the Atlantic and it would seem on the surface that there are no technological questions at issue in the case but this is a pretty clear example, imho, of where technology has changed things to such a degree that the questions it raises are not solved by a narrow mechanical application of existing laws (whether or not that mechanical application itself would/could provide grounds for dispute).

EPIC have a webpage devoted to the case.