If You Can’t Stalk Your Ex Girlfriend with a GPS, Don’t Worry. Get a Gov’t Job and Then Do It Without a Warrant
Second time this week I’m writing about the wacky Ninth Circuit court. Now they have ruled that when it comes to privacy, you have no reasonable expectation to any of it if you park your car in your driveway and you shouldn’t expect that the government can’t track your every move. In a shocking ruling, the court says that government agents should feel free to plant GPS tracking devices on your car in your driveway and follow your every move without ever worrying about having to get a warrant.
From Time 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.
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.
The cops argue that they should be allowed to use technology in place of actually tailing people under surveillance. But what they don’t get is that suspects under physical surveillance actually have a chance to lose their pursuers. Won’t happen with a GPS. And mind you, guys go to jail for doing the exact same thing by implanting GPSes on the cars of stalker victims. What is the difference here? The stalker should have no expectation of privacy? Isn’t the technology easier to use than getting off the couch and manually stalking your victim? If private citizens are barred from high tech stalking, the government should be too.
