Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents  Security vs.
privacy? Reinterpreting the Fourth Amendment  A Yale legal
scholar suggests a radical reinterpretation of the Fourth …
Rubenfeld's big apple-to-the-noggin idea is this: mainstream
jurisprudence regards the Fourth Amendment as protecting an
individual right to "privacy"—which in the late 20th century
came to mean the individual's "reasonable expectation of
privacy"—with courts tasked with "balancing" this against the
competing value of security. This, the good professor argues, is
basically backwards: the Fourth Amendment explicitly protects
the "security" of our personal lives. Excavating a neglected
17th and 18th century conception of "security" leads to a new
reading that both avoids well-known internal problems with the
"reasonable expectation" view and helps us grapple with the
thorny privacy challenges posed by new technologies.  The
received view of the Fourth Amendment dates from the seminal
1967 case Katz v. United States. With the advent of