Cars as Private Property?

[Guest stovepipe]

Here's is another angle why we need to pass a bill in Tennessee deeming our cars to be private property, whether for handgun storage at work (for permit holders) or simply to define the boundaries of our 4th Amendment.

The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS - Yahoo! News

The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS

• By ADAM COHEN Adam Cohen – 1 hr 40 mins ago
  

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. (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

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. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

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. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)

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.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.

Edited August 25, 2010 by stovepipe
To add text

[Guest Glock23ForMe]

Why would the government want to track our driving? To see how many times we go support "Toys for Ta-Ta's"? The Department of Defense ALLOWS the general public to use GPS. We are in no way entitled to it. The DOD can shut it off whenever they want to, for any reason. They set it up that way for that purpose. That way, if something happens, i.e. war, the DOD can shut off the GPS and only military receivers can use the signal.

I don't think we need to worry about them tracking us, as much as how we will all be lost heading to the beach if they ever decide to cut it off.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

I still use printed maps.

If the gov is going to ever use this against us,

I will continue to use printed maps. GPS enabled

cellphones aren't necessary items for me, either.

[Machman]

I think some folks aren't getting what this is saying..

It means that a Govt agency can GO ON YOUR PROPERTY to attach a GPS tracking device to your vehicle sitting in your driveway WITHOUT obtaining a warrant, unless it's fully fenced / locked / etc (which then enters into a situation where only those with enough money to erect walls / fences / whatever have any expectation of privacy). If this doesn't disturb you just a little bit, well...

[Guest 6.8 AR]

Oh no, I understand fully, and it's disturbing as hell.

It's going to take a while to get rid of the mess our

government has usurped. People keep electing

progressives and it will never get fixed. It's not the

kind of thing to just bitch about, and it's too late

when they use their new power on you.

Quit giving government our liberty.

[Ebow1]

This is where delivering for Domino's for just under a year comes in handy. I know more routes through and around Bellevue then even the most modern of GPS units. They're not kept up to date with the building of new roads or the closings of old ones. But yes, this is still extremely disturbing.

[Mike.357]

It is very disturbing that this goes on. Would l I be wrong to assume that this was something that happned under King George II?

Sooner or later a black box will be required on all new vehicle purchases, wait and see.

[Guest slothful1]

I think some of you are confused. This article has nothing whatsoever to do with GPS navigation.

[Mike.357]

sloth on my screen the 7th line of type down mentions GPS.

[Guest slothful1]

GPS, yes. Not GPS navigation. Most typical consumer GPS units (TomTom, Magellan, Garmin) aren't even capable of transmitting information at all. They only receive satellite signals and calculate where you are. This article is about the government hiding a GPS-enabled tracking transponder on your car. It has no relation to consumer use of GPS.