64
Opinion of the Court
disregarded, but rather were afforded Fourth Amendment protection.
Respondents rely principally on precedents such as Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), Warden, Maryland Penitentiary v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294 (1967), and Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U. S. 583 (1974), to demonstrate that the Fourth Amendment is only marginally concerned with property rights. But the message of those cases is that property rights are not the sole measure of Fourth Amendment violations. The Warden opinion thus observed, citing Jones v. United States, 362 U. S. 257 (1960), and Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505 (1961), that the "principal" object of the Amendment is the protection of privacy rather than property and that "this shift in emphasis from property to privacy has come about through a subtle interplay of substantive and procedural reform." 387 U. S., at 304. There was no suggestion that this shift in emphasis had snuffed out the previously recognized protection for property under the Fourth Amendment. Katz, in declaring violative of the Fourth Amendment the unwarranted overhearing of a telephone booth conversation, effectively ended any lingering notions that the protection of privacy depended on trespass into a protected area. In the course of its decision, the Katz Court stated that the Fourth Amendment can neither be translated into a provision dealing with constitutionally protected areas nor into a general constitutional right to privacy. The Amendment, the Court said, protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, "but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all." 389 U. S., at 350.
As for Cardwell, a plurality of this Court held in that case that the Fourth Amendment did not bar the use in evidence of paint scrapings taken from and tire treads observed on the defendant's automobile, which had been seized in a parking lot and towed to a police lockup. Gathering this evidence was not deemed to be a search, for nothing from the
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