Wired looks at how the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Maryland has been used to justify the massive level of surveillance conducted of Americans. That 1979 decision started with a purse-snatcher whose obsession with the victim of his crime led police to use a pen register to track all of his phone calls, including the multitude of times he rang her. "Nobody is more surprised by the long-term ramifications of the case than the prosecutor who won it," Wired reports. "'It was a routine robbery case. The circumstances are radically different today. There wasn’t anything remotely [like] a massive surveillance of citizens’ phone calls or communications,' [Stephen] Sachs says. 'To extend it to what we now know as massive surveillance, in my personal view, is a bridge too far. It certainly wasn’t contemplated by those involved in Smith.”'
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