Welcome to the American police state, folks!

I think it is safe to say that most American citizens are
good, relatively honest people. In other words, the vast
majority are not hard core thugs and criminals. That being
the case, "innocent until proven guilty" should still be the
attitude of American law enforcement agencies. However, I am
wondering if that is still really the case.

In other words, the issue that I have with the following
article is the use of the word "suspect". There is such
great potential to abuse that word by the government and law
enforcement agencies. The truth of the matter is that none
of us really know what criteria the government and law
enforcement agencies use when trying to determine who is a
suspect, and who isn't.

We would be foolish to deny that there is a great deal of
corruption in both government and law enforcement agencies,
and that is why I worry about the use of this word
"suspect". In short, the government, or a law enforcement
agency, can determine that an individual is a suspect for
any old reason, and who are we to say differently? Once that
occurs, unhindered GPS surveillance can begin, and we would
never even know about it.

Then, of course, there are also telephone wire taps, email
sniffing, Internet data packet sniffing, millions of
surveillance cameras spread all across America's cities,
etc. Do you already feel like you are inside a glass box
looking out? It's scary, folks. Welcome to another look at
America's eroding personal freedoms -- like privacy!


Judges Divided Over Rising GPS Surveillance

By CHARLIE SAVAGE - NYT

August 13, 2010


WASHINGTON -- The growing use by the police of new
technologies that make surveillance far easier and cheaper
to conduct is raising difficult questions about the scope of
constitutional privacy rights, leading to sharp
disagreements among judges.

A federal appeals court, for example, issued a ruling last
week that contradicts precedents from three other appeals
courts over whether the police must obtain a warrant before
secretly attaching a Global Positioning System device
beneath a car. The issue is whether the Fourth Amendment's
protection against unreasonable searches covers a device
that records a suspect's movements for weeks or months
without any need for an officer to trail him.

The GPS tracking dispute coincides with a burst of other
technological tools that expand police monitoring abilities
-- including automated license-plate readers in squad cars,
speed cameras mounted on streetlight poles, and even the
widely discussed prospect of linking face-recognition
computer programs to the proliferating number of
surveillance cameras.

Some legal scholars say the escalating use of such high-tech
techniques for enhancing traditional police activities is
eroding the pragmatic considerations that used to limit how
far a law-enforcement official could intrude on people's
privacy without court oversight. They have called for a
fundamental rethinking of how to apply Fourth Amendment
privacy rights in the 21st century.

"Often what we have to do with the march of technology is
realize that the difference in quantity and speed can
actually amount to significantly more invasive practices, "
said Paul Ohm, a University of Colorado law professor and
former federal computer-crimes prosecutor. "It's like you
keep turning the volume knob and it becomes something
different, not the same thing just a little louder."

Last week, such calls seemed to be answered by an
ideologically diverse panel on the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia. It overturned a drug
trafficking conviction because the evidence against the
defendant included tracking data from a GPS receiver that
the police hid under his sport utility vehicle without a
warrant. The device essentially recorded his whereabouts 24
hours a day for four weeks.

Traditionally, courts have held that the Fourth Amendment
does not cover the trailing of a suspect because people have
no expectation of privacy for actions exposed to public
view.

But the appeals court argued that people expect their
overall movements to be private because different strangers
see only isolated moments and a police department's
surveillance resources are limited. GPS technology, by
allowing police departments to inexpensively track someone's
comings and goings, changes that equation, it said.

"Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not
revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person
does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does
ensemble," wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg.

"A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce
whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a
regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient
receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular
individual or political groups -- and not just one such fact
about a person, but all such facts."

Supreme Court review of the decision seems likely. It
contradicted decisions in three similar GPS-related cases by
appellate panels in Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco.

In 2007, for example, Judge Richard Posner argued that
"following a car on a public street" is "unequivocally not a
search within the meaning" of the Fourth Amendment. While
acknowledging that "technological progress poses a threat to
privacy by enabling an extent of surveillance that in
earlier times would have been prohibitively expensive," he
concluded that using a GPS device to investigate a suspect
crossed no constitutional line.

The Fourth Amendment "cannot sensibly be read to mean that
police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than
they were in the 18th," he wrote. "There is a tradeoff
between security and privacy, and often it favors security."

Judge Posner also cited a 1983 Supreme Court ruling
upholding the use of a hidden radio transmitter that helped
police trail a suspect. But other judges have argued that
the limited power of that device make it different from the
prolonged, automated tracking that GPS devices enable.

On Thursday, five judges on the San Francisco appeals court
dissented from a decision not to re-hear a ruling upholding
the warrantless use of GPS trackers. Chief Judge Alex
Kozinski characterized the tactic as "creepy and
un-American" and contended that its capabilities handed "the
government the power to track the movements of every one of
us, every day of our lives."

There is no central repository of how many police forces use
the devices, which cost several hundred dollars. But there
has been a recent spate of cases about them. Several state
supreme courts -- including those in Massachusetts, New
York, Oregon and Washington -- have ruled that their state
constitutions require police to obtain a warrant to use
them.

Related questions have arisen over businesses' customer
records, which courts generally allow police to obtain
without a warrant. The appeals court in Philadelphia is
considering whether the Fourth Amendment protects location
data for cellphones.

The few Fourth Amendment cases involving contemporary
technologies to reach the Supreme Court so far have
generally stuck to the principle that privacy rights cover
only actions no one else could normally see or hear. In
2001, for example, the court ruled that without a warrant,
police cannot point a thermal imaging device at a home in
search of heat associated with marijuana growing.

Privacy advocates say the volume of public information about
people that is increasingly collectable has called into
question that approach. Stephen Leckar, who represented the
defendant in the GPS case before the District of Columbia
appeals court, argued that judicial oversight is needed over
the mass collection of information like a suspect's
movements, in order to maintain checks and balances.

But Orin Kerr, a George Washington University professor and
former federal computer-crimes prosecutor, criticized the
ruling. He argued that the police need clear rules, and said
it would sow confusion to require warrants for collecting
large amounts of information about suspects' action in
public because investigators cannot know ahead of time how
much they will eventually compile -- or how much is too
much.

"Police will never know whether they have violated the
Fourth Amendment until some judge tells them," Mr. Kerr
said.

In other privacy contexts, courts have recognized that
aggregating information can make a legal difference. For
example, the Supreme Court has interpreted a privacy
exception in the Freedom of Information Act as covering "rap
sheets" compiling people's criminal records -- even though
each offense was separately listed in public documents
scattered through decades of courthouse files.


Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your Download Center 4 Mac BBS Software & Christian Files.  We Use Hermes II


--- Hermes Web Tosser 1.1