If Onstar and its constant monitoring gets your tinfoil hat in a knot, get ready to spring for the double-layered, name-brand stuff.
A decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has, by way of not hearing this case-- it failed to get a majority vote -- that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your driveway. Thus, remotely tracking someone via sneaking onto their property, affixing a GPS transmitter and then watching their every movement without a warrant is totally cool.
Except that the courts have already that a driveway is part of the home and thus, privilege to curtilage (the area of the property that can be considered private). But this time the courts decided to say that the defendant needed to prove why he should expect privacy in the driveway of his own home.
It's a mess of a case and, now with eight states adopting the same thinking, we should see an appeal to the Supreme Court to clarify and right our rights.
As tends to happen, the Bureaucracy is a few steps behind the technology and say all you want, "I didn't do anything bad, what do I care?" freedom is freedom and wrong is wrong. And this is wrong.
I'm going to leave it in the hands of the dissenting Judges: "I don't think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle's every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior."
Full text of USA V. Pineda-Moreno here.
stovebolter says:
02:36 PM, 08/26/10
Sweet, now I can go through with my plan to install GPS trackers on all highway patrol vehicles. There's no expectation of privacy at a speed trap. After all, if they're not doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about.
brn says:
03:56 PM, 08/26/10
Glancing at the document, it seems that even Articulable Suspicion isn't required. That's ridiculous.
I would expect that affixing a foreign object to my vehicle, without at least Probable Cause, should be considered vandalism.
As stovebolter implies, does this now mean that anyone can attach a tracking device to anyone's vehicle? Can I place a tracking device on the vehicle of one of these judges?
cardesigner82 says:
04:24 PM, 08/26/10
@brn & stovebolter
You both have valuable points. I'm sure there are some sort of constituents in place for those particular uses of a tracking device(I have not read the article yet). Albeit, it sounds pretty fair to reverse the roles on the law...it may be considered a federal offense in the case of tracking a supreme court judge. Lol
cz_75 says:
07:22 PM, 08/26/10
Big Brother is watching, but you have absolutely NOTHING to worry about.
carlisimo says:
07:46 PM, 08/26/10
I'm blown away. The original case shouldn't even have happened… it would've been easy to get court permission to track this guy, right?
Furthermore, the ruling establishes that there's a huge difference between parking your car in a garage vs. leaving it out on the driveway (or as the dissent specifically mentions, being able to afford a driveway gate greatly affects your legal protection). I don't get it.
church123 says:
07:52 PM, 08/26/10
This should be overturned at a Supreme Court level, but it is unconscionable that it even made it to the appelate level.
After reading about this (non) decision on another site, I decided to check out pricing on GPS trackers as well as _detectors_. A detector for checking for all sorts of broadcasting bugs runs $300-$700. If they work, probably not a bad investment for anyone with secrets to keep, and it should be part of every serious criminal's kit bag.
If you want to track someone, you're looking at $200+ for a tracking module. Only problem is, even the recorders (meaning they don't broadcast, and have to be recovered) only have 40-80 hours of average record time (every 10-60 seconds storing a location). The real time trackers look to only have 8-16 hours of time, but I'll admit my search was cursory at best.
Nonetheless, I agree that the best way to quash this crap is to start making noise about tracking officials, judges and LEOs. Or better yet, actually do it! Of course, they might just try and pass a law making it illegal only if you're tracking _them_.
hybris says:
08:37 PM, 08/26/10
"Nonetheless, I agree that the best way to quash this crap is to start making noise about tracking officials, judges and LEOs. Or better yet, actually do it! Of course, they might just try and pass a law making it illegal only if you're tracking _them_."
Want to track all the police cars in LA?
There's a App for that.
And that's exactly what might happen if this doesn't get over turned.
mnemonicj says:
07:03 AM, 08/27/10
This article is so hard to read. I think the verb decided or its synonyms are missing from a couple parts of this article.
"A decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has DECIDED, by way of not hearing this case-- it failed to get a majority vote -- that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your driveway."
"Except that the courts have already DECIDED that a driveway is part of the home and thus..."
ptcdawg says:
09:18 AM, 08/27/10
Nothing out of California surprises me anymore. This is a scary case.
greenpony says:
05:22 PM, 08/27/10
Sad.