Time has a rather disturbing piece this morning on "The Government's New Right to Track Your Moves." A recent ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California and eight other Western states, has implied the government has every right to track your every move by GPS without a warrant.
Writes Adam Cohen:
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....
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 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.
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.
As you read the rest, the author points out two ways in which the government violated Mr. Pineda-Moreno's rights, as well as highlighting how this case differs from another recent circuit court's unanimous ruling that GPS tracking for an extended period of time without a warrant would be an invasion of privacy. The author predicts this will end up in the Supreme Court, and I tend to agree. The outcome of the court's decision will have enormous ramifications, as the dissenting Judge Alex Kozinski in the Ninth Circuit court wrote: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."
