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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."
Its mostly personal with a chance of privacy in my house.
Radar is based on radiation. This, if there are people in the house, would give them cancer. Go back to infrared.
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.
He's doing better than me then. I'm not sure of the question.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Just need to know if that baby crib is occupied or not. No sense dropping a flashbang into an empty room.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This technology is here now and is similar to the earlier use of thermal imaging cameras, except it works better. If radars can detect breathing of people trapped in rubble, then they can certainly detect breathing of someone on the other side of a door, or in a house across the street.
I think what the judge is getting at here is whether that is a "search" in the 4th amendment sense. Is the probable cause standard for "a specific person" or "anyone". In the cited case, they were looking for a fugitive, in a house associated with the fugitive (e.g. the bad guy had paid for electrical service) at a time when the guy was expected to be there. That stuff alone is enough to provide probable cause.
But they also used the radar from outside. And that's what the judge wasn't sure about.
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.
Nest-type thermostats, entertainment streaming, alarm systems, and the beat (down) that is voluntary surrender of privacy goes on.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
What he said was that the police had enough grounds to believe the person was at home to enter. So _if_ evidence by the use of the Doppler radar was unlawful, it didn't matter, because the police had enough evidence without that.
Interestingly, the police searched the home because they believed there might be other people and weapons present (they did find weapons), while the doppler radar only spotted one person. Here the judge decided that as far as he knew, the doppler radar was not enough evidence that there only was one person. If the doppler radar worked better, then the police could _know_ that there is one and only one person, and wouldn't be allowed to do a search in case there is someone else dangerous in the house, but that wasn't the case.
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If you're not Loyal to the Group of 17, and conforming to Correct Thought, then your disharmony will be modified with an eye toward perfecting it.
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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.
Pfft thats what no knock warrants are for. More pork barrelling?
You're absolutely right, that's why they added the ability to change it. It's been done several times. There's a fairly huge difference, however, between following the process to change it, and changing how you interpret what it says. That's how you end up with torture being OK, killing American citizens without due process being OK, arbitrary suspension of habeus corpus being OK, attacking other countries at the whim of the president being OK...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
If they are so sure something bad is going on why not just left them use the standard of probably cause and get the proper warrant.
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
Ignorance of the law is an excuse.
http://thinkprogress.org/justi...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There's a fairly huge difference, however, between following the process to change it, and changing how you interpret what it says.
Apparently it wasn't to the founders. I suggest you re-read some of the rulings of the John Jay Supreme Court. John Jay being a founder and all.
That's how you end up with torture being OK, killing American citizens without due process being OK, arbitrary suspension of habeus corpus being OK, attacking other countries at the whim of the president being OK...
Never learned about the Alien and Sedition Acts, eh? That was passed during an undeclared naval war on France. It also allowed the imprisonment and deportation of people considered "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" and suppression of free speech by the government. You aren't actually naive enough to really think the people who wrote the Patriot Act were the first ones to invent that whole "enemy combatant" thing, did you? A group of "The Founders" were doing that 200 years before it.
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."
So long as the radar isn't being used to justify the reasonable suspicion the suspect is present needed to enter the home to serve an arrest warrant, which would constitute a search in and of itself, I don't see the problem. And note, this is only talking about using this as a tool to serve arrest warrants. They're not suggesting driving down the street and randomly scanning everybody's home. That's already out by...I can't remember the case name. The one with the infrared cameras on helicopters to find grow operations. But as a precautionary measure to help assess the number and location of occupants to a home they already have a valid warrant to search? That's fine. Makes things safer for everyone involved.
To have a valid warrant, the state needs probable cause to believe the things or persons for which they are searching are in the home. For a search warrant, a sworn witness who will say "I saw Connie_Lingus carrying the stolen TVs into the garage." For an arrest warrant, an officer staking out the home who can swear "I saw him enter the premises." But once they've got that, they're going to enter anyway.
Today, because they're scared of the gun-toting, meth crazed baddies ready to shoot it out with them, they bust down your door with overwhelming force and throw a flash bang in your baby's crib. But if they use the radar to scan the house first and see there's only one guy home sleeping in the back bedroom (plus the baby in the front), maybe they won't be so grenade-happy. Certainly it would help outrage people more (and they should already be outraged. Why they're not I don't know) to hear, "wait, they threw the grenade in the room even though they already knew there was nothing in there but a sleeping baby because of the radar?! Outrageous!"
But the really interesting question is, "does the use of the radar override the reasonable suspicion of danger which authorizes a defensive sweep of the house?" Really, the judge was asking if this should limit the search powers of the police. Right now when the police enter your home to serve a warrant they need to perform a quick sweep to make sure there isn't somebody else hiding in the back room with a gun. That's a reasonable suspicion of danger, so the police quickly scan through the house. They're not allowed to go tossing your sock drawer (unless their warrant authorizes them to toss your sock drawer) because there's little chance a baddie is hiding there. Unless he's very, very tiny...
Thing is, if during the defensive sweep, they spot evidence of a crime in one of the back rooms, they can seize that, even if it has nothing to do with the crime they're investigating. This is reasonable. They're authorized to be there, and it's in obvious sight in the room (plain view from the first few feet in the doorway. Not the sock drawer). Think bloody knife on the bed, the bodies of the toddlers you've been murdering...or your bag of weed on your night stand.
Question is, if the radar eliminates the reasonable suspicion there's somebody else hiding in the house, then performing the defensive sweep in addition to the radar sweep would be unreasonable, and so the toddler corpses would be inadmissible. And what the judge is saying is the radar isn't good enough to dispel that reasonable suspicion. Maybe one day it will be, but not yet.
It still is a better situation. If the cops are going to enter the home anyway, the more forewarning they have about the location and numbers of occupants the less likely (and certainly less justifiable) excessive use of force will be.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ultra-wideband is also used in "see-through-the-wall" precision radar-imaging technology,[10][11][12] precision locating and tracking (using distance measurements between radios), and precision time-of-arrival-based localization approaches.[13] It is efficient, with a spatial capacity of approximately 1013 bit/s/m.[citation needed] UWB radar has been proposed as the active sensor component in an Automatic Target Recognition application, designed to detect humans or objects that have fallen onto subway tracks.[14]
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
dogs will bark when you knock on the door
Yea, sure! That sounds totally infallible!
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
They had an arrest warrant. They were there only to arrest him. Previous SCOTUS rulings said police can enter a residence with an arrest warrent if there is 'reason to beleive the suspect is within'. Police said use of radar was part of what gave them reason to think he was in there.
This is nothing new. Just because a new technologies exist does not mean we need to redefine our rights to explicitly deal with it.
Peaking in the windows of a home, using a drug dog to sniff around a house, using thermal imaging to inspect the contents of a home, using radar/x-ray vision/telekinetics/etc. to search inside of a home are ALL considered searches and should all require probable cause and a search warrant under the 4th Amendment.
[A]n individual may not legitimately demand privacy for activities conducted out of doors in fields, except in the area immediately surrounding the home...The [Fourth] Amendment reflects the recognition of the Framers that certain enclaves should be free from arbitrary government interference. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Homeowners possess a privacy interest that extends inside their homes and in the curtilage immediately surrounding the outside of their homes, but not in the "open fields" and "wooded areas" extending beyond the curtilage (see Hester v. United States, 265 U.S. 57 [1924]). - http://criminal.findlaw.com/cr...
Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. ___ (2013), is a decision by the United States Supreme Court which held that police use of a trained detection dog to sniff for narcotics on the front porch of a private home is a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and therefore, without consent, requires both probable cause and a search warrant. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), held that the use of a thermal imaging, or FLIR, device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
Typical radiated power for through the wall radar is 10 milliwatts, and usually around 1 mW. That's apparently enough to penetrate 30 feet of concrete and rebar rubble
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/26/nasas-new-heartbeat-sensor-could-save-lives/
A back of the envelope says you got more exposure from your WiFi when you entered your comment than you'd get from these things.
The operator of the radar will get a lot more cumulative exposure than the persons being watched, and I would imagine that the manufacturer would have thought about that.
I guess you really didn't read the OET Bulletin 65 you said you were handed as an Amateur Radio Licensee.
Doppler radar is continuous wave at low power (milliwatts), as is readily ascertained by looking it up, on Wikipedia, even. Or, by looking up the FCC registration. It's commonly used in those Part 15 automatic door opening thingies at 10 GHz (X-band) or 24 GHz (K-band); police speed radar uses the same bands; as do microwave/radar motion detectors for burglar alarms.
The safety of a CW signal is probably the *most studied* of any RF exposure: it's easiest. It's things like pulsed radar where there are observed athermal effects (e.g. audible clicks from high power pulses) that are less well understood.
There's no recognized mechanism for non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer, aside from thermal effects (heating), and that heating is what the limits (e.g. 10 mW/sq cm for low microwave frequencies) are based on.
Should a cat or a reasonably well trained dog be the difference between the cops breaking down the door or not?
Meh, a dog just gives them some target practice. SOP is to shoot any dogs on sight. Great being a suspect, right?
"And to address a following point that may get raised; electric meters are sometimes used as evidence of what is happening inside a house. I think that also violates the intent of the 4th."
In actuality, they don't do it that way for constitutional reasons and for safety of electrical workers. The power company (in California, anyway) does not tell law enforcement about abnormally high electricity consumption, because PG&E and SCE don't want bad guys with guns (in general) thinking that utility workers (in general) are on the "other side". There are also plenty of constitutional restrictions against "dragnet" type sweeps (e.g. getting all utility data for a given area).
What they do is develop probable cause (e.g. neighbor complaints about the smell of the grow operation), do a regular old street surveillance operation (e.g. appearance of house is inconsistent with number of people coming and going, and not simply accounted for by "they're on vacation and their lights are on timers) to develop more probable cause.
But that would only get you a "knock and ask" warrant, and if the person wasn't in the house, or hid, then they'd have to go back later.
Then, they go to the utility and ask them for *specific data* for that house. Then, since grow ops consume a lot of power, they often bypass the meter (felony theft of service), which the utility really cares a lot about. With modern meters, they can turn the meter off for a half cycle, and if there's voltage on the load side of the switch, and the house doesn't have solar panels (with a plausible broken anti-backfeed), they NOW have real good probable cause to enter the house for
a) theft of service
b) potential hazard to utility workers (backfeeding of power)
So now it's easy to get a no-knock warrant for entry.
Once they're inside, Oh my... look at that, a grow operation. And though it is not what they entered for, it is not "fruit of the poisoned tree" because they have already got probable cause from their surveillance. They essentially serve two warrants at once.
ITYM "Great living next door to a suspect" or maybe "Great knowing an arsehole who things swatting is a valid way to resolve conflicts"
Essentially, it's all about the power and proximity that determines the danger. First level of danger is being blinded or having your testicles ruined with non-ionizing radiation. Microwaves can blind you, so I assume radar can also since it's in some of the same RF bands. It's all about power and proximity, again.
The human eyeball has the right size and structure to be resonant with a number of RF frequencies, which leads to the blinding danger I mentioned. Similar size and relative shape of the testicles makes them similarly vulnerable. These parts are endangered first by the molecular-vibration increase that can lead to burns, but blindness and sterility can occur sooner than the pain of burning can be felt.
First thing to do is never stand close in front of a microwave transmitter dish, or a radar gun. They are definitely dangerous.
As for the danger of cancer from those varied non-ionizing radiation sources, it's not certain, but I won't be taking any chances knowing the other proven effects.
There is already a SCOTUS ruling on this issue: Kyllo v. United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States)
In this case, the police used FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red) cameras equipped on a police helicopter to look at the heat signatures through the walls of a house.
The courts ruled (5-4) that doing such is a defacto search of the property and a clear 4th amendment violation.
The point of the ruling, is not the intrusiveness or the technical means by which the police overcome the privacy and property rights, but the fact that doing so is a search of the property.
Justice Scalia, who wrote the presiding opinion, further went on to protect against all future attempts at bypassing the barriers of privacy and conduct searches of property without a warrant by the way he wrote his opinion. Again, it is not the technological means by which one overcomes the property's barriers to privacy, regardless how non-intrusive or passive such measures are, but the fact hat doing such is conducting a search of the property.
Quote from Wikipedia: "Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), held that the use of a thermal imaging, or FLIR, device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
Is this intended to use imaging that is NOT thermal imaging so that a warrant is not required? Someone clear this up for me
You mean IR radiation? That stuff with even higher energy than radar?
you almost totally missed my point, but that's ok...i wouldn't expect the typical slash-dotter to understand my personal views on LE in this county.
carry on...you will soon live with the consequences of your police state fantasies.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.