Fourth and Fifth Amendments Concepts And The Use Digitally Acquired Information in Both Business Ethics and Criminal Cases

Discussion Prompt

Discuss the basic concepts behind the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and what relevance you believe they have to the use of digitally acquired information in both business ethics and criminal cases.Ethically, how much of such acquired information should be employed against the individual

Sample Paper On Fourth and Fifth Amendments Concepts And The Use Digitally Acquired Information in Both Business Ethics and Criminal Cases

Fourth and Fifth Amendments

The Fourth Amendment protects the US citizens from unreasonable property seizures and searches by the government. It safeguards against random arrests, and it is the foundation of the law regarding wiretaps, search warrants, safety inspections, and stop-and-frisk among other surveillance. The concept behind this Amendment is to ensure that people are not harassed by the government officials unnecessarily and that their privacy is respected. The amendment was made to increase individual comfort at their homes and to eliminate the fear of government interference in people’s life. This concept canbe applied in digital technology where citizens should be protected from unlawful access of their digital information by the government. This includes collection of data from their computers and storing the data for further analysis.It should also be used to protect citizens from digital surveillance. This privacy of personal information stored in digital devices should also be upheld by the fourth Amendment (Harper, n.d.).

Fifth Amendment protects people from self-incrimination. Thus, accused are not required to respond to capital crime unless on an indictment or presentment of a grand jury. This Amendment protects people from testifying against themselves or from making personal confession on committing the crime. In digital era, this Amendment can be used to protect citizens from providing digital data or key identification details to permit access of incriminating data that include passwords, decryption keys and the likes (Prescott, 2014).

Ethically digital information found on public digital platforms where anyone can access them can be acquired and be employed against a person. Also information sent from the person device to another person can be acquired if the receiver of the message is willing to cooperate. However, it would be against fourth amendment to seizure individual digital devices to extract information, especially without a warrant. It would also be unethical to anticipate to get key login or access keys to be able to access data from the accused devices and to use it against the accused in the court of law.

 

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