Chatrie v. United States · ¶37

Whether an expectation of privacy counts as legitimate is less the result of any fixed set of rules than of “guideposts” stretching back to the Fourth Amendment’s beginnings. Id., at 305. From the founding onward, we have explained, the Fourth Amendment has sought to secure the “privacies of life” against the exercise of “arbitrary power.” Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 630 (1886); see Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 305. So too we have recognized, and repeatedly, that the Amendment was designed “to place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance.” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948); Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 305. Whatever the form of an attempted incursion, the Fourth Amendment protects Americans’ long-held conviction that no government official should have free access to the most closely kept aspects of their lives.

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