Do you agree with this 9th Circuit Court ruling regarding your driveways and GPS devices?
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000
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13 Comments
Comment #820
Just more empowerment of Big Brother watching. Of course it would come out of California. Can’t Cal and the other States protest this and cry foul. I sure would.
Comment #821
No. Not at all.
How can they possibly claim that: "you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements"?????
Comment #822
9th circuit is all you needed to say
9th circus is more like it
Supreme court may have a different opinion. It certainly won’t be the 9th circus opinion
Comment #823
Well I only drive about 3000 miles a year so who cares, they can stare at my garage if that’s what turns them on. Besides, the tin foil hat I wear should protect me. And hell, I wear a GPS device on my bicycle and am happy to share the data. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if my house was filmed 24/7. I sort of have a thing about that though…
Comment #824
If I was subject to that kind of bullshit, I’d take it up as far as it’d go. That’s not something you take lying down.
Comment #825
The most liberal circuit in the court system based in San Fran approved it.
Comment #826
Moral of the story is check your vehicle, and if you find a GPS device, place it on the nearest trash truck and watch the government track the same route day after day. And no, I think the court’s ruling is utter crap.
Comment #827
Suppose the gov’t had arranged to have a car followed the traditional way, with people in a car. Would that need a warrant?
I think this falls somewhere in between tapping a phone line and the above example in the realm of privacy invasion. I’d like to see Congress write a law saying a warrant is required, but I don’t know if I’d say this falls into violating someone’s rights.
Comment #828
Nope, completely disagree, terrible ruling, and the fact that the court would even go as far as to state that property protected by a fence or security is the only property where you could expect reasonable privacy is absolutely absurd, moreso than the fact that this came from the 9th circuit in a very liberal district where conservatives dissented with the ruling.
Comment #829
It is disgusting and a disgrace.
What I do not understand is why liberal California does this crap and does it in many Nanny law ways, yet liberals think they are liberal, They are not liberal they are totalitarian, and personally I think Arnold is an donkey in an elephants suit. Either way the rest of that state is Democrat like Pelosi (the totalitarian).
Comment #830
They can easily see your car in satellite images. They could track your car that way, too.
Should the government be required to install huge covers over all roads to block surveillance of your vehicle by satellite?
On the flip side, you are allowed to display obscene pornographic images on your vehicle, including excretory functions, and hang rubber testicles from your bumper. So it works both ways.
http://www.cvillain.com/images/trucknuts.jpg
Vehicles are in a very strange legal gray area where ordinary principles don’t apply.
Comment #831
I think this is another case of the government overstepping the bounds, although I would draw the line with the original case allowing them to use such devices without a warrant to follow suspects, rather than just be upset over placing them in driveways.
Should the government have the right to trace anyone without cause this way?
I wonder if this connects to the expansion of the power to trace communications, using cell phones and such.
Comment #832
The judges said it doesn’t violate the fourth.
But I would contend that it DOES violate the 14th
[No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.]
The law DEFINITELY deprives ALL citizens of the "liberty" to move about without fear of being stalked.
The ruling says that there is no expectation of privacy in a driveway, and that GPS tracking is not an invasion of privacy.
The same thing was said about police digging through your garbage.
That led to ANYONE can dig through your garbage.
Therefore they are basically saying "stalking is legal".