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Smile and say Ingsoc. A U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that it is perfectly acceptable for agents of the government to covertly invade your personal property, trample over your privacy rights and secretly track every move you make, without even bothering to obtain a warrant. Seriously.
Adam Cohen from TIME magazine lays out the details here:
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.
And we thought we had it bad with spy-cam recycling bins.
There is, as Cohen notes, at least solace that other courts have ruled that government agents covertly using GPS to track citizens for an extended period of time is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. Imagine that.
H/T: Campaign For Liberty
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