Government Can Track Your Every Movement

According to a recent appeals court ruling, the government can sneak onto your property, place a GPS tracking device on your car, and track your every movement... without once establishing probable cause or obtaining a warrant. Yeah, I'm sure this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000

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.

This isn't the law of the land everywhere, just in the states controlled by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals... the most liberal and most overturned appeals court in the nation.

This is the Kelo decision for the Fourth Amendment. If you'll recall, the SCOTUS Kelo ruling said that the Constitutional protections of private property meant that our government could take your land and give it to somebody else. Period. This new decision means they can conduct near-total surveillance on anybody they want to, with no Constitutional limitations.


It's not only a bad ruling, it's a death knell for freedom.

The Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"Secure in their persons" against "unreasonable searches." Yeah, that language seems to control, here. We have such an absolute right that the government could right now institute a program of installing a GPS tracker on each and every car owned in the United States... without any evidence of a crime being committed by the persons being monitored.

Somehow, I don't think that's right.

Happily a different circuit court recently ruled that extended tracking WAS a violation of privacy... and these conflicting rulings mean that the issue is likely headed to the Supreme Court, where, hopefully, this bad decision can be overturned into the trash-heap where it belongs.

You know, the Ninth Circuit has a long history of delivering controversial and extreme rulings that are later overturned. I wonder if we need a new policy... If an appeals judge is overturned by Scotus a certain number of times, he is removed from the bench. Or if not that, then maybe fine them. Some consequences are necessary to convince judges to rule according to the law and the Constitution instead of some whacked-out, government-centric ideology.