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Reasonable Expectation of Privacy The Fourth Amendment protects the people against unreasonable searches and seizures. The test for what's unreasonable is the "reasonable expectation of privacy": if a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in an item or a dwelling to be searched, the search will be considered unreasonable (and thus, unconstitutional) unless a warrant is obtained. This category contains excerpts from various court opinions that shed light on this issue.
Court Opinions on the Topic:
Obviously, however, a 'legitimate' expectation of privacy by definition means more than a subjective expectation of not being discovered. A burglar plying his trade in a summer cabin during the off season may have a thoroughly justified subjective expectation of privacy, but it is not one which the law recognizes as 'legitimate.' His presence, in the words of Jones [v. United States, 362 U.S. 257, 267 (1960)], is 'wrongful'; his expectation [of privacy] is not 'one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable."' Katz v. United States, 389 U.S., at 361 (Harlan, J., concurring).
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If a private party breaks into a locked suitcase, a locked car, or even a locked house, observes incriminating information, returns the object of his search to its prior locked condition, and then reports his findings to the police, the majority apparently would allow the police to duplicate the prior search on the ground that the private search vitiated the owner's expectation of privacy. As JUSTICE STEVENS has previously observed, this conclusion cannot rest on the proposition that the owner no longer has a subjective expectation of privacy since a person's expectation of privacy cannot be altered by subsequent events of which he was unaware.
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The majority opinion is particularly troubling when one considers its logical implications. I would be hard-pressed to distinguish this case, which involves a private search, from (1) one in which the private party's knowledge, later communicated to the government, that a particular container concealed contraband and nothing else arose from his presence at the time the container was sealed; (2) one in which the private party learned that a container concealed contraband and nothing else when it was previously opened in his presence; or (3) one in which the private party knew to a certainty that a container concealed contraband and nothing else as a result of conversations with its owner. In each of these cases, the approach adopted by the Court today would seem to suggest that the owner of the container has no legitimate expectation of privacy in its contents and that government agents opening that container without a warrant on the strength of information provided by the private party would not violate the Fourth Amendment.
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It is difficult to understand how respondents can be said to have no expectation of privacy in a closed container simply because a private party has previously opened the container and viewed its contents.
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[Since the Court has made it explicit in this opinion that] individuals in our society have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the fact that they have contraband in their possession, the Court adopts a general rule that a surveillance technique does not constitute a search if it reveals only whether or not an individual possesses contraband.
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