Archive for June, 2011

Question by bmovies60: Do you agree with this 9th Circuit Court ruling with regards to your driveways and GPS devices? Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, place a GPS device on the bottom of your vehicle and preserve track of everywhere you go. This does not violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your very 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, not long ago made the decision the government can monitor you in this way practically anytime it desires – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a unsafe choice – a single that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is specifically offensive since the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the tiny personal privacy that nonetheless exists, the court recommended, need to belong mostly to the wealthy.

This situation began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents made the decision 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 couple of feet from his trailer property. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

Soon 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. Far more disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who have been subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, made the decision this month to let it stand.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000

Read More >>