A divided US supreme court ruled this week to uphold a Maryland law that allows the police to collect without warrant DNA material from persons who are arrested. The 5-4 decision was greeted with dismay by civil liberties advocates who see it as a body-blow to privacy and a further erosion of the US constitution’s fourth amendment, which is supposed to protect individuals from excessive government intrusion. The truth is, in an era of mass surveillance, we have little privacy left to lose – and the courts have shown little willingness to resist law enforcement claims that access to our personal and physical data is necessary for them to do their job.

This willingness to forgo the privacy of the many to identify the misbehavior of the few is already well established in America’s warrantless surveillance program. In January, President Obama signed into law a five-year extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows for the monitoring of personal phone calls and emails as long as one of the communicants is outside the US. We have also recently been given reason to believe that all our domestic phone calls may be ‘captured as we speak’ and that no ‘digital […]