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Federal Court Nixes Weeks of Warrantless Video Surveillance
An anonymous reader writes with this news from the EFF's Deep Links:
The public got an early holiday gift today when a federal court agreed with us that six weeks of continually video recording the front yard of someone's home without a search warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. In United States v. Vargas local police in rural Washington suspected Vargas of drug trafficking. In April 2013, police installed a camera on top of a utility pole overlooking his home. Even though police did not have a warrant, they nonetheless pointed the camera at his front door and driveway and began watching every day. A month later, police observed Vargas shoot some beer bottles with a gun and because Vargas was an undocumented immigrant, they had probable cause to believe he was illegally possessing a firearm. They used the video surveillance to obtain a warrant to search his home, which uncovered drugs and guns, leading to a federal indictment against Vargas.
If he's an undocumented immigrant, why don't they just deport him instead of going through all of this?
I'm all for the forth amendment and all, but having a camera pointed to the outside of his house is no different than having a cop sitting outside the house in a car.
If you point the camera on a politician you won't have to wait a month to watch a crime to happen.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
America is rapidly deciding that her guiding principles are optional, and that the law only applies if law enforcement says it does.
Wide spread warrantless wiretapping, surveillance, and parallel construction all say that the police and government will do whatever the hell they like, and your rights be damned. And if they have to lie to the court to get what they want, that's OK too.
And for all of those who claim you still have free speech and all that ... the answer is simply for now. When it becomes expedient to take away that right, they will.
Land of the free, home of the brave. If it wasn't so scary it would be hilarious.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why does the fourth amendment apply? If he is not a citizen of the US, our laws shouldn't protect him.
Did you think about the consequences of what you are saying even for a second?
"...he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed..."
Why does the fourth amendment apply? If he is not a citizen of the US, our laws shouldn't protect him.
Because the Constitution is a document describing what powers the government has and how these powers may be used. It's like a default-deny firewall: the government has no powers whatsoever, except these enumerated powers. The Constitution is emphatically not a document describing what rights a person (citizen or not) has and when they will be honored.
The document was written based on the idea of "natural rights". You have certain rights simply because you are a human being; the government either recognizes that or it becomes dysfunctional and fails to fulfill its major purpose, which is to protect your natural rights. The Founders (mostly Deists) explained it in terms of us having been "endowed by our Creator" with such rights. You could also remove the Creator-concept entirely and argue that such a system simply works better and does the greatest good for all involved, and thus is inherently superior to systems that reject the concept of natural rights.
You don't have rights merely because the government deigned to let you have them, or decided that depriving you of them wasn't worth the trouble. A system where that's the foundational principle has lost even the pretense of human dignity. That kind of system wouldn't even have to bother with the incremental "hey we have an excuse that sells (protect the children! stop the terrorists!)" encroachment of liberty that we're seeing now. It could just go straight into open tyranny without having all those little baby steps for naive people to ignore.
You may wish to brush up on a little American history, specifically why the Tenth Amendment was written. It affirms that the federal government has only those powers which are delegated to it, with the rest being reserved by the states and the people. I'm all for deporting this guy, by the way. We should either enforce our immigration laws (like Mexico and every other sovereign nation) or repeal them, but if we're going to arrest this man, there's a process that must (and should) be followed.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
A cop bought a video camera to catch an illegal alien unloading a firearm at bottles on his own porch, among other things...catches the guy, along with a significant drug operation no less...and the court "nixes weeks of warrantless video surveillance" is a GOOD THING? You'll notice they aren't nixing the YEARS of warrantless surveillance that every citizen of the U.S. has been under, nor the YEARS of collusion with friendly nations to extend that surveillance program to every citizen, worldwide. No, they're nixing the one bit of fucking video that might actually have been worth recording in the fucking first place. Footage of a criminal, committing a crime. How novel.
The EFF logo for this story was perfect, "extremely fucking foolish" was the first thought that came to mind.
It's simple enough. This was a local police department in a small rural area, so they were held to the rules. If they were a national agency with an effectively unlimited budget, ties to major military-industrial corporations, and loads of political clout, the courts would have performed some mental gymnatics and invented a bullshit reason why that inconvenient Fourth Amendment doesn't really apply. Currently "anti-terrorism" is popular.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think you are missing the point of the story. Nobody really gives a flying fuck whether this one guy happens to get deported or not, because he's no longer an interesting or important part of it. What happened is that the government Got Caught, yet again, doing illegal shit. Whoever they were investigating during the commissions of their own infractions, is irrelevant. It doesn't have anything to do with Latin-vs-other, or even presidents. It was a local PD that got caught acting like criminals. That's bad, because we want PDs to be fighting crime, not being the crime.
It will also continue as long as there is no real penalty for getting caught. If a cop breaks the rules in this manner, the worst that happens is the case gets thrown out and the defendant goes free. Start throwing these cops in state penitentiaries for a year or two, making sure they go in the general population and get no special treatment, and you will see an immediate and drastic decline in this kind of abuse. And why shouldn't we do this? Cops who engage in this behavior are violating the very highest law of the land. That should carry a penalty.
The way I see it, when a cop breaks the law it's much worse than when an ordinary citizen breaks the law, because the cop is entrusted with special powers and has sworn to uphold the law. It follows that cops should be punished much more harshly when they break the law than a citizen who does the same thing. There is no other way you're going to return to being a free nation.
Talk to old people sometime about what cops used to be like. They were once genuine public servants. If you had a problem, you could find a cop and he'd help you. Average people didn't fear the police the way they do now. That's what we should return to.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Oh look at the poor persecuted "christian" that is so bent out of shape because his publicly funded school or courthouse doesn't have a monument to the 10 commandments. Paying 5 or 6 figures for a monument, as has happened in the past, is an endorsement.
Look, numbnuts, it's not "your" school or courthouse, it's our school and our courthouse, and "us" includes atheists, hindi, buddhists, jews, etc., as well as christians, or so-called "christians" that have completely forgotten the Sermon on the Mount.
--
BMO
Even though police did not have a warrant,
And that deserves a Darwin award. Seriously, couldn't they have gotten one in the first place? I seriously doubt, if they had well documented reasons to believe something was up, that they wouldn't have been able to find one.
This case was in the bag (or would have been in the bag), but authorities dropped the ball. I've been on jury duty, and I've seen this before. Cops drop the technical ball, and we in jury duty have to say "not guilty" even though we know deep in our guts that the guy on the stand did it.
It is annoying, but this is how the law is meant to operate in a civilized country. This just stresses the point that authorities need to do their shit better, all the time.