“without public discussion or the approval of Congress”

While I wish we didn’t have to rely on the British press to give us our news, so often it seems that they are the only source for news that ought to be national. As to why the American news outlets shy away from stories like the one about the Predator drone used to spy on Americans on their land without a warrant, it’s anyone’s guess.

Anyway, here’s what the British press (the Daily Mail) reports:

Meet the Brossarts, a North Dakota family deemed so dangerous that the local sheriff needed unleashed an unmanned Predator drone to help bring them in.

The Brossart’s alleged crime? They wouldn’t give back three cows and their calves that wandered onto their 3,000-acre farm this summer.

The same aerial vehicles used by the CIA to track down and assassinate terrorists and militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan are now being deployed by cops to spy on Americans in their own backyards.

But increasingly, the federal government and local police agencies are using those drones to spy criminal suspects in America with sophisticated high-resolution cameras, heat sensors and radar. All of it comes without a warrant.

[…]

Allowing local sheriffs and police chiefs access to spy planes happened without public discussion or the approval of Congress. And it has privacy advocates crying foul, saying the unregulated use of the drones is intrusive.

‘There is no question that this could become something that people will regret,’ former Rep Jane Harman, a Democrat, told the Los Angles Times.

The sheriff says that might not have been possible without the intelligence from the Predators.

‘We don’t have to go in guns blazing. We can take our time and methodically plan out what our approach should be,’ Sheriff Janke told the Times.

All of the surveillance occurred without a search warrant because the Supreme Court has long ruled that anything visible from the air, even if it’s on private property, can be subject to police spying.

However, privacy experts say that predator drones, which can silently fly for 20 hours nonstop, dramatically surpasses the spying power that any police helicopter or airplane can achieve.

Wait a second. Why are they only quoting a Democrat? Surely, the Republicans are not in favor of spying on Americans with Predator drones, are they? Or are they? I notice also that Jane Harman is a former Congressperson. What about the current members of Congress. Are they planning on holding hearings? Or is totalitarianism allowed to just proceed without authorization, simply because some bureaucrat decides to do it?

And what does “visible from the air” mean?

According to a local report I found on the Brossart case, these unmanned robots have devices that see and sense things human beings cannot:

Proponents say the high-resolution cameras, heat sensors and sophisticated radar on the border protection drones can help track criminal activity in the United States, just as the CIA uses Predators and other drones to spy on militants in Pakistan, nuclear sites in Iran and other targets around the globe.

For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws.

Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other planes. Flying out of earshot and out of sight, a Predator B can watch a target for 20 hours nonstop, far longer than any police helicopter or manned aircraft.

“I am for the use of drones,” said Howard Safir, former head of operations for the U.S. Marshals Service and former New York City police commissioner. He said drones could help police in manhunts, hostage situations and other difficult cases.

But privacy advocates say drones help police snoop on citizens in ways that push current law to the breaking point.

“Any time you have a tool like that in the hands of law enforcement that makes it easier to do surveillance, they will do more of it,” said Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

“This could be a time when people are uncomfortable, and they want to place limits on that technology,” he said. “It could make us question the doctrine that you do not have privacy in public.”

It strikes me that even if something visible would lie within the “plain sight” exception to the Fourth Amendment, visibility ought to mean visible to the naked eye or an ordinary law enforcement officer. Otherwise, police will use x-ray machines, heat sensors, and backscatter technology willy-nilly and the Fourth Amendment will mean nothing.

Moreover, can anything that these Predators might see be called “visible” in the normal sense of the word? Where is the witness to testify that he saw something and who can be cross examined in court as the Confrontation Clause requires? Can we be accused of a crime by robots?

FWIW, I think Predator drone technology in law enforcement is unconstitutional.

I realize that and a quarter will not buy me a cup of coffee, but it just ticks me off that aside from Ron Paul, no one who is running for office could care less, nor could their supporters.

Sickening.

MORE: Speaking of “visibility,” Glenn links an article about a new photographic technique that can see things that have never been seen before:

…scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second.

The project began as a whimsical effort to literally see around corners — by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible.

“When I said I wanted to build a camera that looks around corners, my colleagues said, ‘Pick something that is more safe for your tenure,’ ” said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab. “Now I have tenure, so I can say this is not so crazy.”

Dr. Raskar enlisted colleagues from the chemistry department to modify a “streak tube,” a supersensitive piece of laboratory equipment that scans and captures light. Streak tubes are generally used to intensify streams of photons into streams of electrons. They are fast enough to record the progress of packets of laser light fired repeatedly into a bottle filled with a cloudy fluid.

The instrument is normally used to measure laboratory phenomena that take place in an ultra-short timeframe. Typically, it offers researchers information on intensity, position and wavelength in the form of data, not an image.

But that can be translated into images, and it’s not hard to imagine that law enforcement could find innumerable uses for using this technology to conduct criminal searches without warrants.

An “image” captured an interpreted this way could certainly be considered “visible” in the sense that people could look at it.  It could be shown to a judge.

But is in plain sight?


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

4 responses to ““without public discussion or the approval of Congress””

  1. dr kill Avatar
    dr kill

    Jane Harmon? The Jane Harmon who bought Newsweek for a buck? That Jane Harmon?

  2. Eric Scheie Avatar

    Yeah. Why her? Is no one else opposed to this?

  3. Veeshir Avatar

    Now we all need remote control planes with a Ruger 10-22s attached to shoot them down.

  4. […] Security Act, Patriot Act provisions, TSA Viper Squads operating on public highways, SWAT Teams, Predator drones, and the rest might be questioned by ordinary […]