How the Fourth Amendment Applies to Cloud Computing

Terry passed on this story about a Minnesota law student that wrote a paper on how the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment applies to cloud-based data. You can grab the the PDF here.

Hypothetically, if a briefcase is locked with a combination lock, the government could attempt to guess the combination until the briefcase unlocked; but because the briefcase is opaque, there is still a reasonable expectation of privacy in the unlocked container. In the context of virtual containers in the cloud...encryption is not simply a virtual lock and key; it is virtual opacity.

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