Probably Probable Cause: The Diminishing Importance of Justification Standards

The laws that govern police access to private information act like a volume knob set to an officer's level of certainty: the more certain an officer is that a desired investigative step will turn up evidence of a crime, the more weight we give to his or her request to access private information, and the more privacy we allow his or her request to outweigh. These laws rest upon the belief that we can distinguish between meaningfully different levels of police certainty and balance them against meaningfully different levels of privacy. But what if they rely on a false precision? What if the police rarely have any suspicion without having a great amount of suspicion?