August 27, 2010

The Government Can Track Your Car's Location by GPS Without Cause or Warrant


navigation.diagram.500.jpg 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."

source

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