By now, the tale of Cooley v. Foreman, better known to America as “the Afroman defamation case,” or even just “the Afroman case,” has been repeatedly rehashed in the national news media. In general, the theme of this coverage has been bemusement: Afroman’s rap songs about the situation, the absurd answers given by the plaintiffs under cross-examination, and so forth. Yet overlooked in all the merrymaking is the grave violation of Joseph Foreman’s, also known as “Afroman’s”, fundamental civil rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Photo by AP.

Imagine a neighbor’s Ring security camera picks up a figure walking to a front door at 11:47 p.m. Police identify the figure as their suspect, and the prosecutor plans to play the clip for the jury. There is just one problem: that footage never sat on a hard drive. Instead, it streamed through a home Wi-Fi router to Amazon’s cloud servers, where it lived until the homeowner downloaded it to their phone, forwarded it to a detective, and the detective saved it to a department laptop before turning it over to the prosecution. At each step, someone handled the evidence. Nobody documented any of it. That chain of events illustrates the growing authentication problem with Ring doorbell footage, and courts are beginning to notice.

Photo by Tim Büning on Unsplash‍.

In 1789, Congress enacted the All Writs Act (AWA), codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1651, granting federal courts the authority to issue "all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions." The statute was designed as a tool for courts to issue orders not otherwise provided for by existing law. Today, the AWA has become a contested instrument of the federal government, used for compelling technology companies to assist in criminal investigations. A gap-filling statute from the founding era has become the government's go-to tool for cracking open encrypted smartphones.