03/02/2020 In re 381 Search Warrants Directed to Facebook, Inc. :: 2017 :: New York Court of Appeals Decisions :: New York Case Law :: New York Law :: US … The District Attorney's warrant was issued under section 2703 (a), which expressly states that SCA warrants are "issued using State warrant procedures." For the reasons stated by the majority, an order denying a motion to quash such a warrant on grounds of the users' rights is not appealable under this Court's current jurisprudence (majority op at 9-15). [FN4] WILSON, J.(dissenting): The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, urged on the nation by the New York ratifying convention in 1788 (William J. Cuddihy, The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning, 602-1791, 695 [1st ed 2009]), secures us against unreasonable searches and seizures by our government. It reflects the American consensus that the general warrants and writs of assistance popular among British officials in colonial government — orders that licensed their possessors to scour homes and businesses for anything of potential interest to the Crown, and that were a significant provocation to the revolutionary sentiment then taking hold in New England — had no place in a nascent republic that so deeply abhorred arbitrary power.[FN1] The Amendment's effect is "to put the courts of the United States and Federal officials, in the exercise of their power and authority, under limitations and restraints as to the exercise of such power and authority" (Weeks v United States, 232 US 383, 391-92 [1914])[FN2]. Although the Supreme Court initially interpreted those limits as applying to searches of material things only (Olmstead v United States, 277 US 438 [1928]), it has, since Katz v United States (389 US 347 [1967]), extended the protections to communications in which one has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Although the framers of the U.S. Constitution knew only the technologies of the 1780s, the framers of the New York Constitution's provision against unreasonable searches and seizures worked 150 years later and knew more. Our state constitution, unlike its federal counterpart, includes explicit protections against unreasonable searches and seizures of electronic communications (NY Const., art. I § 12). In 1938 —- after an "epochal debate" among the delegates to that year's constitutional convention that aroused the interest of newspaper editorial boards, the letter-writing public, the Governor, and a slew of labor organizations and law enforcement officers (Revised Record of the Constitutional Convention of the State of New York at 553 [1938]) —- the People approved what became article I, § 12. That section did not merely incorporate verbatim the protections of the Fourth Amendment, but expressly extended those protections to telecommunications. The [*16]delegates who drafted Section 12, whose discussions thereof stretched over more than three weeks of the convention and nearly five https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/court-of-appeals/2017/16.html 16/44