Anthony Amsterdam is considered a major figure in undermining the reasoning for the death penalty's implementation and its long suspension in the US. But he also wrote importantly and influentially on privacy issues, and the cited paper is probably the most famous.
A nice way of looking at the provisions of the 4th Amendment, as it pertains to all citizens, which is to say, the presumed innocent, unless otherwise found otherwise:
Our thinking about questions of this sort is inevitably distorted by the fact that fourth amendment
controversies ordinarily come before courts only in criminal prosecutions where what the policeman sees
through the window is a crime or evidence of it. In that setting, it is natural enough to react by saying that
anyone who commits a crime or leaves criminal evidence lying around in front of an open window
deserves exactly what he gets. Let him at least have the decency to draw the shade before he commits a
crime.
But, unless the fourth amendment controls tom-peeping and subjects it to a requirement of
antecedent cause to believe that what is inside any particular window is indeed criminal, police may look
through windows and observe a thousand innocent acts for every guilty act they spy out. Should we say
that prospect is not alarming because the innocent homeowner need not fear that he will get caught doing
anything wrong? The fourth amendment protects not against incrimination, but against invasions of
privacy—or rather, as Katz holds, of the right to maintain privacy without giving up too much freedom as
the cost of privacy. The question is not whether you or I must draw the blinds before we commit a crime.
It is whether you and I must discipline ourselves to draw the blinds every time we enter a room, under
pain of surveillance if we do not.
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