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Doppler Radar Used By Police To Determine Home Occupancy
schwit1 sends an article by Orin Kerr about a court case where a judge has had to weigh Fourth Amendment protections against law enforcement's ability to use a Doppler radar device to tell whether people are present within a home. Kerr writes:
If the government has the burden of proving reasonable suspicion, should the court treat the absence of information in the record on this point as not changing its otherwise-reached view that there is reasonable suspicion (as it does), or should that be treated as a potentially serious deficiency in getting to reasonable suspicion that the government has to overcome?
I’m not sure of the answer. We don’t normally encounter this question because we normally understand the uses and limits of investigatory tools. If the officer looked through the window and didn’t see any other people, for example, we could intuitively factor that into the reasonable suspicion inquiry without having to think about burdens of proof. I’m less sure what we’re supposed to do when the government use a suspicion-testing technological device with unknown capabilities."
The judge in the court case wrote, "New technologies bring with them not only new opportunities for law enforcement to catch criminals but also new risks for abuse and new ways to invade constitutional rights (PDF). ... Unlawful searches can give rise not only to civil claims but may require the suppression of evidence in criminal proceedings. We have little doubt that the radar device deployed here will soon generate many questions for this court and others along both of these axes."
From that crappy summary it's practically impossible to tell what's going on. Why does the police need to know who is in a house anyway? What crime are we talking about? Being in a house? Not being in a house? I really don't get it.
This is not a plain senses device. Therefore a warrant is required.
It seems pretty cut and dried to me.
These issues came up 13 years ago in Kyllo v. United States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... . In that case, use of FLIR to read heat signatures inside a home were deemed to be a search under the 4th amendment. Why the use of Doppler radar would be any different is beyond me. Perhaps the court needs to expressly rule that the use of technology to gain information about what is going on inside someone's home constitutes a search and requires a warrant. It seems obvious to me that this is a breach of everyone's constitutional rights.
Just need to know if that baby crib is occupied or not. No sense dropping a flashbang into an empty room.
God forbid they do their job the old-fashioned way by monitoring the residence for 24 - 48 hours prior to a raid.
I personally would damn well want to sue/arrest my neighbor if I found out he was using doppler radar to check if I was home.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You knock on the door to search the place. Those inside stay quiet and refuse to admit their presence. The frequency of the dopple radar is such that it penetrates the walls and is reflected by the salt water bags(people) keeping quiet - but their hearts beat and they breathe. Motions of chest walls create a detectable shift in frequency = people present, but refusing to answer the door = allowed to force entry to execute the search warrant.
It is a problem if the police makes this assumption.
The radar can't tell the difference between a person or a pet. Should a cat or a reasonably well trained dog be the difference between the cops breaking down the door or not?
In the end I suspect it is going to end up to be another tool for saying "Well, the radar indicated people but no-one opened. Clearly something was wrong so we broke into the house. Turned out it was just a radar malfunction, but we dropped/found this while we were snooping around."
Agreed. He is clearly an attention-seeking idiot. Who also happens to be a race-baiting Liberal.
There has been one published paper showing a possible link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer. That doesn't mean there is a link.
No, get your facts strait. There has been 1 study that has shown that the relatively low levels of RF in a cellphones might be linked to cancer. Which is worth further study. But strong RF sources (i.e. far stronger than a Cellphone) are well known to be harmful to human health in many ways. Mainly they heat tissues in a very abnormal way that the human body is not able to cope with. Repetitive damage to cells is known to be carcinogenic. There's not been conclusive evidence that it's a direct carcinogen but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence. It's something that just hasn't been studied all that much because at the levels required to produce the effect the RF energy is already very dangerous and the FCC has strict limits on it anyway.
I remember the Mythbusters where they "Busted" the myth that you could cook a turkey in front of a radar dish. My father laughed his butt off at this. He was in the airforce in the 1970s as a radar tech and at one point was stationed in Alaska working on the BMEWS systems which had ranges in excess of 2000 miles. They put out Megawatts of power. One of the common problems he'd run into would be dead birds stuck in various parts of the radar dishes. They wouldn't just cook... they'd burst into flames.
Here's one of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Go stand in front of that and tell me non-ionizing radiation in safe and doesn't cause cancer.
I've no idea what the police are using. I've no idea if it's safe... and neither do the police. Doplar radar has not been studied for safety when being pointed at a house, I can guarantee you that. They should not be doing this.
Cops used to peek into houses with thermal imaging until the courts told them they needed a warrant for that. This doesn't seem any different other than it radiates.
For an institution sworn to uphold the law they sure do bend it a lot when it's convenient for them.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Right, that's true. At the time the radar guns were "Always on" you'd just point them at something and the display would display a number. When there were no cars the cops would lay them in their laps and not turn them off. Several developed tumors on their legs. Many of them sued but None of them won their cases (that I know of) due to lack of evidence. But since then they've changed radar speed detectors to only be on momentarily.
And this is the difficulty with this issue... The number of people with a need to be using strong RF sources on a daily basis are very few, and it's something that's hard to study. And the solution to avoiding exposure is very simple in most cases. In the case of the police, leaving the radar on was giving away their position to radar detectors... In the case of powerful radar, it's dangerous in its own right so they power it down before working on it. In the case of cellphones and other consumer devices, having high wattage transmitters creates all sorts of interference and band leakage problems so there are plenty of reasons to want to limit RF power that don't include cancer.
There are lots of reasons to limit RF power before you get to levels where you have to start worrying about cancer. Pointing Doppler radar at a residential house though? That's just stupid. That's not been proven safe, so we should assume that it's not.
I'm pretty certain thermal imaging was already ruled a 'search' and required a warrant, so I'm not sure why using active radar is even a question to this judge...
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!