Here's an argument that recent developments in surveillance technology (drones etc...) make updating a good idea, even an imperative one.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether we trust the authorities to
impose limits upon themselves when it comes to deployment of
surveillance technologies that legislators nor courts have specifically
circumscribed. The fact is that the law is out of date. The Bill of
Rights was written a long time ago, well before cellphones, the
internet, spy drones or even video cameras were invented. Our Electronic
Communications Privacy law is woefully obsolete, itself predating widespread usage of three of those four technologies.
We
need to bring the Bill of Rights into the 21st century for the same
reason the ACLU and others want the Obama administration to tell us its
legal rationale for its overseas killing operations: the public should
know what rules the government is bound by, particularly when it comes
to our rights to privacy and due process. Unfortunately, that's simply
not the case. Today, we live in an era of secret law, from top-secret
CIA and military killings abroad, all the way down to the DOJ's view of law enforcement location tracking powers
here in the US. Where the law doesn't explicitly provide guidance, we
are largely ignorant of how the government interprets its authorities
with respect to new technologies, its powers, and our rights.
