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Question by Classical Liberal (libertarian): What do you believe about government GPS monitoring? Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS gadget on the bottom of your vehicle and preserve track of all over the place you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, due to the fact you do not have any affordable expectation of privacy in your personal driveway — and no affordable 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 decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no want for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.) It is a harmful choice — 1 that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the kind of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges additional insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little private privacy that still exists, the court recommended, ought to belong primarily to the rich.

This situation began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents determined to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was expanding marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the evening and located his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking gadget to the vehicle’s underside. After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a 3-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all completely legal. More disturbingly, a greater 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 even though appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the aid of GPS.)

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a topic that has each conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s pro-privacy ruling was unanimous — determined by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (Comment on this story.) Plenty of liberals have objected to this type of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has carried out so most passionately. “1984 might have come a bit later than predicted, but it really is right here at final,” he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia in which privacy is basically nonexistent, he warned: “Some day, soon, we could wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”

http://www.time.com/time/nation/post/,8599,2013150,00.html?xid=rss-fullnation-yahoo

What do you believe about this?

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