Slashdot Mirror
Justice Sotomayor Warns Against Tech-Enabled "Orwellian" World
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke on Thursday to faculty and students at the University of Oklahoma City about the privacy perils brought on by modern technology. She warned that the march of technological progress comes with a need to enact privacy protections if we want to avoid living in an "Orwellian world" of constant surveillance. She said, "There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don't like the fact that someone I don't know can pick up, if they're a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."
Also, as far as I am aware, you are not allowed to have security cameras on your property that film parts of other's properties. Those laws should suffice, or at least be amended to include "roaming" cameras.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
She's probably just fine with the *state* peeping into your (not her) business. That's the very definition of a self labeled "progressive". Guns, drones, private (no tax man involved) monetary interactions between people, healthcare, retirement, etc.
Actually, Sotomayor is a bit of an outlier on the Supreme Court and has been highlighted for laying the groundwork to reinstate stronger Fourth Amendment protections -- particularly against the government intrusions -- especially in her ruling in United States v. Jones . (For details on her privacy rulings before joining the Court, you can see EPIC's summary here.)
Note that in TFA she was warning about "Orwellian" surveillance, which specifically tends to refer to a world where the government is spying on you, not just private citizens. The quotation highlighted in TFS seems to focus on private citizen regulations, but she has also demonstrated more concern about many government invasions of privacy than most other Supreme Court members, including those who are definitely NOT ''progressives."
The landowner's claim raises some fundamental legal principles about the ownership of land and the airspace above the land. These principles have been developing over time. In early common law, when there was little practical use of the upper air over a person's land, the law considered that a landowner owned all of the airspace above their land. That doctrine quickly became obsolete when the airplane came on the scene, along with the realization that each property owner whose land was overflown could demand that aircraft keep out of the landowner's airspace, or exact a price for the use of the airspace. The law, drawing heavily on the law of the sea, then declared that the upper reaches of the airspace were free for the navigation of aircraft. In the case of United States v. Causby,[4] the U.S. Supreme Court declared the navigable airspace to be "a public highway" and within the public domain.
At the same time, the law, and the Supreme Court, recognized that a landowner had property rights in the lower reaches of the airspace above their property. The law, in balancing the public interest in using the airspace for air navigation against the landowner's rights, declared that a landowner owns only so much of the airspace above their property as they may reasonably use in connection with their enjoyment of the underlying land. In other words, a person's real property ownership includes a reasonable amount of the airspace above the property. A landowner can't arbitrarily try to prevent aircraft from overflying their land by erecting "spite poles," for example. But, a landowner may make any legitimate use of their property that they want, even if it interferes with aircraft overflying the land."[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Zero. Since the Supreme Court's Kelo decision, you don't "own" a goddamn thing. You have property only at the pleasure of the government, and as long as there isn't a corporation who can make better use of your property. And by "better use", I mean, will pay more in taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Do you understand how the Supreme Court works? They can only adjudicate cases brought before them. They can't make policy outside of those cases, so in fact, she is not in a "position to do more than talk" until a case comes before her challenging surveillance. And even then, she's one vote out of nine.
A Supreme Court justice can do three things in their official capacity: talk, write and vote, and the talking they do is mostly asking questions. They can't initiate any action at all.
If you want something "done", you've got to talk to your congressbum.
You are welcome on my lawn.
and if they do cross my property line they can be held responsible, including me shooting it out of the sky.
Can you shoot down airliners who cross your property lines?
You actually don't own all airspace over your property. There has been a SCOTUS ruling on the matter.
Thus, a landowner "owns at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land," and invasions of that airspace "are in the same category as invasions of the surface.
It is clear that the land owner does not own navigable airspace. Navigable airspace is defined with respect to fixed wing aircraft, the FAA has done that, it is unclear as to what navigable airspace means with respect to small drones. There is even a clause that allows helicopters to fly below normal flight minimums. There still needs to be legislation defining exactly what "space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land" legally means. Having to fly comercial drones at fixed wing minimums would render them useless. This is one of the reasons why the FAA is holding back on allowing commercial drones as the laws backing them up are unclear.