GoKawiilArs caught up with Ferguson to learn more.
Ars Technica: You open with an anecdote of asking students how many use the Google Maps app, and they all raise their hands. That’s true for most of us. We rely heavily on these tools now.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: I don’t want the book to be a scolding book, or say you shouldn’t have a Ring doorbell camera on your front door and you shouldn’t have an Echo in your home. I want people to just see the duality of data: smart devices are surveillance devices and you are literally purchasing something to surveil you. You think that the cost and benefits work in your favor, but let’s make sure you got that calculation right. Maybe you keep that same calculation, or maybe you see the vulnerability.
There are certain groups of people that have always been targeted by police surveillance. The subtitle of my first book was Involving Race and Policing, and it still is a reality. But the aperture of surveillance has expanded to cover people who are ordinarily more privileged. Now I think everyone is starting to see, “Wait a minute, this data on my doorbell camera in my home, on my email, could be used if I suddenly become the person that the government wants to target.” That could be protesters, dissenters, journalists, scientists, you name it. People are now seeing the vulnerability of a world that wasn’t really based on laws; it was based on norms of prosecutorial decision and discretion, and that’s sort of fallen away.
Ars Technica: Is our justice system prepared to grapple with the implications of all this data we’re collecting ourselves, particularly when it comes to interpretations of the Fourth Amendment?
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: I’m a law professor and I teach the Fourth Amendment. I teach constitutional criminal procedure every year. So I think about it a lot. I think about the intersection of new technology and old law. We have this document ratified in 1791 that says that the government cannot unreasonably search or seize our persons, papers, homes, or effects. We need to give new life to that in a digital age and a world where the exposure that we face is dramatically different than it was at that time. Yet some of the same principles are very real. The founding fathers were concerned about a power of general rummaging, where customs agents can go into your home and see what you’re doing, if you were writing treasonous missives against the king. They were concerned about giving the government that power because they knew it would be abused.