> The U.S. argued the simple act of government computers collecting his or anyone else’s phone records aren’t violations of the Constitution’s ban on unreasonab

> The U.S. argued the simple act of government computers collecting his or anyone else’s phone records aren’t violations of the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches or seizures and, in its appeals-court filings, suggests such issues only come into play when a government employee looks at a specific person’s phone records. Except that a government employee specifically instructed the computers to gather and analyze his records to flag them for storage or not. This is clearly a search performed at the request of a government agent, and should trigger 4th amendment protections. They can't take papers out of everyone's house just because they use robots to do it: we'd all recognize that the robots were merely a tool following instructions of a government agent who instigated the seizure. The case is no different because they used a different tool to perform the search and seizure - it was at the request and under the direction of a US government agent.