Supreme Court Addresses Mosaic Theory in Fourth Amendment Surveillance Cases
The U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly addressed the 'mosaic theory' in the context of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. This legal premise suggests that while individual pieces of information may not, on their own, constitute a search, their aggregation can reveal a detailed picture that implicates a legally protected interest. This theory is particularly relevant to prolonged or comprehensive government surveillance. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals first applied this theory in *United States v. Maynard* (2010), ruling that extended GPS surveillance constituted a Fourth Amendment search. Although the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in *United States v. Jones* (2012) on a property/trespass theory, concurring opinions supported the privacy implications of long-term data collection. More recently, in *Carpenter v. United States* (2018), the Supreme Court held that acquiring extensive historical cell-site location information (CSLI) was a Fourth Amendment search, ...
