Ninth Circuit Court: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves (without a Warrant)

[Better Believe It]

Ninth Circuit: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves (without a Warrant)
by Adam Cohen
August 25, 2010

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.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Read the full article at:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html

[enlightenment]

1. Secretly planted?

They hardly have to plant anything. Mobile phones are the equivalent of a tracking collar on a deer, anyway.

[Land Shark]

3. Get the Google "Droid" phone - 24/7 GPS tracking of yourself at all times.

That said, the existence of a greater invasion of privacy does not reduce concern over what may seem a lesser, though still serious, invasion of privacy.

[rocktivity]

2. Unequal protection under the law

because it wouldn't affect people who keep their cars locked in garages. And since you have no expectation of privacy when you park your car outdoors, people also have a right to steal them!

:eyes:
rocktivity

[Bombero1956]

4. if you can park your car in the garage

The can't enter without a warrant.