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

[Ban Hammer 13,342]

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."

link

[HAL 9000 96]

Yeah that's pretty freakin crazy.

Would this craziness be OK if it were for criminal investigations under court supervision? AKA, having a court order to track a vehicle in the commission of a crime?

[Ban Hammer 13,342]

Yeah that's pretty freakin crazy.

Would this craziness be OK if it were for criminal investigations under court supervision? AKA, having a court order to track a vehicle in the commission of a crime?

that wouldn't bother me one bit - but the story is quite worrisome.

[HAL 9000 96]

that wouldn't bother me one bit - but the story is quite worrisome.

Indeed.

Humor aside, its one reason I don't use that new app on FB either... the people that need to know where I am can just call me. When tracking becomes a non-criminal issue, all of us should have a problem with it. Not having anything to fear if you've done nothing wrong is no excuse to be tracked like a tagged whale.

[SuperDuper! 230]

If the FBI stuck a GPS under Charles' powerful car, would they fall asleep or call their buddies over to the computer

[Obama 2012 1,714]

walk onto property in Texas and there's a rifle pointed at you very quickly.

[The_Dude 1,142]

that wouldn't bother me one bit - but the story is quite worrisome.

Better watch out Charles. The gubmint is going to track you to see how many times you go to the gun shop so they can track your stockpiling arms cache. They are coming for your guns charles, your guns!!

On a more serious note, I don't really like this, but I do understand the unconventional nature of terrorists and foreign spies, of which this is more directed towards necessitate some sort of shift in monitoring and law enforcement.

walk onto property in Texas and there's a rifle pointed at you very quickly.

Or as the saying goes, 'In Texas, there's only steers and __________" , so you might find a couple of guys making out and too busy to find their guns.

[Ban Hammer 13,342]

walk onto property in Texas and there's a rifle pointed at you very quickly.

that is usually the case.

If the FBI stuck a GPS under Charles' powerful car, would they fall asleep or call their buddies over to the computer

we was talking about that too - as i drive onto a military base, and given the story does not seem to contain much outrage over tagging a vehile but more over tagging it while it is on someone's property, i'm thinking they could just avoid the entire issue about property and just tag it at work or at the mall......

Better watch out Charles. The gubmint is going to track you to see how many times you go to the gun shop so they can track your stockpiling arms cache. They are coming for your guns charles, your guns!!

actually, i don't need to stockpile much anyways, i have plenty.

[mawilson 2,133]

Well, GPS devices are expensive - if they put it on the bottom of my car, I'd sell it.

If they put another one, I'd sell it again and keep doing it until they run out of GPS units.

[BobandXiaomei 14]

I guess if they had a warrant they could do just. But heck Wal-Mart and your grocery store are more interested in tracking you than the government.

A bit off topic: The Right of Privacy is an interesting read.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

The New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS

I don't like the New Right. They're up to no good.

[HAL 9000 96]

Well, GPS devices are expensive - if they put it on the bottom of my car, I'd sell it.

If they put another one, I'd sell it again and keep doing it until they run out of GPS units.

I see you on the black market all draped up in your mawilson bling, offering GPS units. Cheap.

[Ban Hammer 13,342]

I don't like the New Right. They're up to no good.

but it's the new left that's doing it. (it was decided this january). and where is the 9th circuit court? left coast!

[BobandXiaomei 14]

but it's the new left that's doing it. (it was decided this january). and where is the 9th circuit court? left coast!

Case cited was from 2007. Pre-socialist revolutionary times.

[natty bumppo 297]

Better watch out Charles. The gubmint is going to track you to see how many times you go to the gun shop so they can track your stockpiling arms cache. They are coming for your guns charles, your guns!!

actually, i don't need to stockpile much anyways, i have plenty.

a visit to the shop does not equate to a purchase or collecting something from the shop