A national guard soldier ran a thermal imaging unit over a neighborhood. The article does not state why. Based on his findings that a certain house had unusually high thermal readings, a warrant was issued, search was made and the home owner was convicted for raising marijuana in his home.
Leaving aside (please) the issue of if home growing should be a crime in the first place, my concern is with the use of Thermal Imaging device absent of any other suspicion. Now, as I said, it isn’t clear from the article why the device was used in the first place, and this, to me, is the crux of the issue.
My position is that for the police to use these devices when a specific suspicion on a specific place would be ok (ie, they should obtain a warrant to use the device first, similar to applying for a warrant for a phone tap). Otherwise the device and information learned through its use should be fruit of the poisoned tree.
This is a really important case, because in a few years we should have chemical detectors sensitive enough to locate the presence of illegal drugs in a neighborhood by taking air samples from above and/or downwind, and narrow down the location to a single address. If this conviction is overturned, then it could be used as precedent to keep law enforcement agencies from locating people in possession of drugs by such wide-area surveys and using it to get warrants to search their homes. Otherwise, drug prohibtion will be effectively enforceable, millions of casual drug users will be forced to stop. I think those millions of casual drug users are very important if we are going to end drug prohibition, if the only drug users are the most desperate of addicts then it will be hard to make a defense for their legalization.
According to this article from the Dallas Morning News, the equipment at issue here is a lot more invasive than just detecting Stoner Dan’s grow room:
:eek:
Dammit, if there isn’t a reasonable expectation of privacy when I’m on the toilet or having sex, I don’t know when there is. Nevertheless, I’m quite certain the Court will uphold the warrantless search 5-4, maybe even 6-3. I just can’t see both Kennedy and O’Connor suddenly having the Fourth Amendment epiphany that would be necessary to reverse the case.
I’d like a little more clarification I guess then. The NPR story said that the lower courts allowed the scan specifically because the technology used did NOT show the detailed human form (like you see in those infra red shots in the movies), rather just a general indication of the amount of radiated heat.
I think this is total bull. What people do in there homes is between them and God(if they believe in Him that is).
The govt has no business looking in on what is going on in people’s homes. They are the govt not GOD. They are suppose to pave the streets, protect us from foreign oppressors, and tax the hell out of us. They are not supposed to look in our homes with the latest tech equip that some geek invents to invade our privacy(something our forefathers really cared about). This crap is WRONG and it should be stopped immediately.
Matter of fact, I think when somebody invents technology like this they should be convicted for trying to invade privacy. Just my 3 and 1/2 cents worth.
Yes, this is a clear violation of our rights. I’m surprisingly non-outraged by this situation (probably because I don’t have any caffeine in my system). But it’s a violation for two reasons:
There’s no justifiable reason to be searching a large group of homes on a whim. I find that to be a clearly invasive. The belief that it does nothing more than a police officer would, while watching a house, is nonsense. Police officers cannot see heat through walls (well, maybe supercops). Police officers can only see things in plain view. This technology, which has apparently been around and employed since 1992, goes way beyond plain view.
The search did NOT find the marijuana plants. That’s even more important than the first point. It found the halogen lamps. There are quite a few non-drug related uses for halogen lamps and even more reasons why a house would be warmer than average. Are we to assume that because you have a portable heater up against your wall, your house could one day be raided on suspicion of drugs? That’s just insane.
Badtz with all due respect to your concern about the drug laws, the implications of this case go far beyond what you or anyone else may choose to put into your body.
And that is why I’m concerned. As the article linked by MintyGreen points out, there’s far more at risk than simply grannys pot in the basement.
With all the technological advances, this case has serious implications for all of us. And beyond the ‘if you aren’t doing anything illegal’ type of defense, as well.
As stated by Minty the thermal device could determine how many people were in the house and what approximately they were doing. And, if he’s right, we all have much to fear.
In my view, the above issue is precisely what the case ought to turn on. Monitoring the general amount of radiated heat from a particular home does not strike me as overly invasive of privacy. Monitoring that permits an observer to discern activites like bathroom trips or lovemaking is highly invasive, and needs to be predicated on probable cause.
"In cases involving the use of thermal imagers, other circuits have framed the inquiry in the first prong of Katz differently. Those circuits have analogized the excess heat measured by a thermal imager to the excess trash left on the curb, and have asked whether the defendant has manifested a subjective expectation of privacy in the “waste heat” emanating from their homes. Those courts have held, citing California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988), that such defendants have failed to manifest a subjective expectation of privacy in the excess heat. "
My reading is that at least some of the lower courts feel that the current state of the technology does not allow for a violation of the 4th amendment.
"Other circuits that have considered the warrantless use of thermal imagers have held that because of the technical inadequacies of the thermal imager used in their respective cases, the scan of defendants’ homes did not reveal enough intimate details to raise constitutional concerns, all citing Dow Chemical v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 106 S.Ct. 1819, 90 L.Ed.2d 226 (1986). See Robinson, 62 F.3d at 1328 (11th Cir.1995); Ishmael, 48 F.3d at 854 (5th Cir.1995); Myers, 46 F.3d at 669-70 (7th Cir.1995); Pinson, 24 F.3d at 1059 (8th Cir.1994); contra Cusumano, 67 F.3d at 1504 (10th Cir.1995). "
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The defendent’s experts seem to think that the thermal imager could show detailed human activity.
My general feeling on these privacy issues is that anything that is legal for a private citizen to do should be legal for the police as well, and anything further (e.g. searches, wiretapping) should require specific cause or a warrant.
In this case, the monitoring seems pretty intrusive, and I would think it should be outlawed altogether.
But this is all in a moral “How IzzyR believes the world should run” sense - I’m not familiar enough with the nitty gritty details of constitutional law to comment on that aspect.
The thing I find troubling about use of technology such as this is, the police clearly already “troll” for criminals. Ask a teen-age or early-20s black male in a white neighborhood at night about it.
Hell, I’ve been stopped by police when my job has me driving late on a Friday night. One time the cop claimed he saw my right-side tires weaving back-and-forth across the fog line on the highway. I am absolutely certain that did not happen. Once he saw I was coming back from work, he left immediately. Clearly, he just wanted to see if I had been drinking. That’s stopping me without cause. And it’s illegal.
Invasive technology such as we’re talking about here will only make said trolling easier. And even if it is eventually prohibited, it’s not hard to imagine police using the technology but then bolstering their case using acceptible, Constitutionally allowed methods to “clean it up.”
AFAIK, federal agents do not require a warrant to search. What they require a warrant for is to permanently obtain evidence. Last I read, agents could legally enter your house and visually (the mathematician’s “by inspection” method) obtain “evidence” to submit to a judge for a true warrant, wherein evidence may be confiscated and arrests made.
AFAIK, federal agents do not require a warrant to search. What they require a warrant for is to permanently obtain evidence. Last I read, agents could legally enter your house and visually (the mathematician’s “by inspection” method) obtain “evidence” to submit to a judge for a true warrant, wherein evidence may be confiscated and arrests made.
To me, this is a big point. If using this thing without a warrent is ok, then can any private citizen go out and get one and snoop around the neighborhood? I don’t know how far this technology will go, but I find the precident that the police can casually browse around with equipment like this, and get a warrent based on nothing but a higher heat concentration a bit alarming.
The milspec thermal scanners I’m familiar with (among them the one used for fire control in a Leopard 1A5 tank - IOW quite modern) won’t look through walls. If there’s a model out that’ll tell if someone behind a wall is “sleeping, hugging, having sex or using the bathroom”, they’ve made serious improvements to the basic technology. I’ll remain somewhat skeptical - personally I believe that the reporter in question has watched “Blue Thunder”.
A thermal scanner detects radiated heat. Body heat does not radiate directly through walls - when someone enters a room, the outer temperature of the wall will rise ever so slightly and you’ll be able to tell that it’s probably occupied. But as long as there’s a wall blocking the way, you won’t see persons “hugging or having sex”, you’ll see an amorphous blob of heat where the insulation is thinnest.
Of course, if a thermal scanner has line-of-sight to the persons involved, it’s quite easy to see what they’re doing. And if a house radiates noticably more heat than the neighbours, it’ll stand out.
I don’t know if this changes the legal ramifications, but the technology (probably) isn’t as intrusive as Minty’s link would have us believe.
I should have known better than to trust what some dumbass reporter writes in a legal news story. From the Ninth Circuit opinion in U.S. v. Kyllo:
Obviously, this is a very different case if the police were only able to detect excessive heat coming from the home, rather than being able to observe specific activities within. My apologies for the apparently misleading factual description that I reprinted in my first post.
And aynrandlover, it is often helpful to read a link before you post it. As that article makes perfectly clear, the federal agents at issue obtain special “sneak and peek” search warrants before entering the premises, then return to the magistrate for another warrant authorizing them to return and seize any evidence that they saw. By no means is a “sneak and peek” search a warrantless search.
For now (with my limited knowledge of the technology) I agree with this…it doesn’t seem to display human activity per se in the house, but give a general reading of the amount of radiated heat.
If the scan is a general measure of “waste heat”, then it seems analagous to looking through waste garbage…something permitted currently (without a warrant)
However, I do have a certain uneasiness with some of this, it lends itself to a slippery slope argument, especially as the technology will probably improve over time.
The NPR story had the defendent’s attorney comparing the scan to an x-ray, i think that’s a stretch.