8. Privacy In Public

Illustration by Raymond Biesinger for TIME

Walking the streets of New York City in 1949, E.B. White observed that a person could find the "gift of privacy" amid the crowds. More than 60 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that White's paradox may literally be true. On Jan. 23, the court said the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure when it used global-positioning-system signals to track a suspected drug dealer for four weeks without a valid warrant, even though the cops monitored only where the suspect went on public streets. Thanks to that decision, for the first time in American history...

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