With a recent ruling by the court of appeals for the ninth cicuit, whose jurisdiction covers most of the western U.S. along with Alaska and Hawaii, our country is now moving eerily close to a future envisioned in George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984.”
For those unfamiliar with the work, the future nation of Ocenia is a totalitarian society where the government surveils all of its citizens, seeks to constantly brainwash the populous and history is ever-changing to reflect the current governmental stance.
The perpetual state of war for Oceania is but one commonality with modern day America, and now a ruling by the ninth finds that a citizen has no reasonable expectation that the government is not tracking your movements.
Further, the court finds that government agents can sneak into your driveway and place a GPS tracker on your vehicle &mdash all without a warrant. The best part is the government doesn’t even have to notify you that you are being watched.
The kicker to all this is that if an individual has a fence or garage on their property, then they do not fall prey to this new ruling. So, basically those who have no garage or fences (read: poor people) can be tracked at will since the court has found that one has no reasonable expectation of privacy in their driveway.
This decision is a travesty and hopefully will be taken up by the Supreme Court, but until then, this case serves as a dangerous precedent.
The exact text of the Fourth Amendment, the amendment that ostensibly sits in bold opposition to the recent decision, reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
One could sensibly deduce that an individual’s vehicle is considered “effects,” but many states (Mississippi included) consider an individual’s automobile to be an extension of the home. Can then warrantless encroachment upon an extension of the home be extended to the home itself?
What is the most unnerving with this ruling is that the court is shrinking the zone around one’s home that is considered private; whereas, many in favor of constitutional protections would like to see the opposite happen. The scary thing about our time is the near perpetual erosion of individual liberties guaranteed in the Constitution, but trampled upon in the name of security that further moves us along to a police state.
The idea of satellite tracking of citizenry would seem something straight out of the KGB’s (the former Soviet intelligence service) playbook, but it’s happening in modern day America.
In the past decade, mainly under the guise of curtailing terrorist activities, we’ve ceded untold liberties to the government without any guarantee to an end of these “wartime” measures nor submitting them to any oversight or constitutional provisions.
But the individual the government was surveilling in this case was not a terrorist, but an American citizen. The Drug Enforcement Agency was tracking Juan Pineda-Moreno on mere suspicion that Pineda-Moreno was growing marijuana. The unconstitutional encroachment on an individual’s personal property was justified on merely suspicion. Let me say that again; it was justified on the say-so of government agents that an individual was tracked without a warrant.
Yet, this goes unnoticed while we squabble over a moot point of a religious groups right to build a place of worship near the former site of the World Trade Center when that right is unarguably justified by the first amendment.
Hopefully, the impact of the federal government spying on its citizenry without cause, or submitting these steps to any sort of legal justification, is not lost on most.
Conservative or liberal, I would hope that any citizen of this country would feel this is an encroachment on their personal liberties.
Furthermore, not only is this atravesty of warrantless surveillance extended to ancillary federal agencies like the DEA, but also to the CIA. The Bush Administration allowed the CIA to focus its efforts within the borders of the United States in the wake of 9/11; despite the fact when the CIA was created by the National Defense Act of 1947 one of its primary mandates was it could not spy on US soil.
Many would argue if you’re not doing anything wrong then you don’t have anything to worry about, and therefore, the point is moot.
Still, your privacy is supposedly guaranteed because it is exactly that &mdash private. Any invasion of your privacy is supposed to come after judicial review and only upon probable cause.
Information garnered in warrantless forays into an individual’s life can be used maliciously. Information is processed by other people, and at their fingertips is vast amounts of extremely personal data. Allowing invasion into privacy without the benefit of any kind of review opens us all up for subversive intrusion.
David Breland is the copy editor for The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].