Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Monday, December 03, 2012
9th Circuit Gives the A-OK For Warrantless Home Video Surveillance by USFWS Agents
Can law enforcement enter your house and use a secret video camera to record the intimate details inside? On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unfortunately answered that question with "yes." U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents suspected Ricky Wahchumwah
of selling bald and gold eagle feathers and pelts in violation of
federal law. Equipped with a small hidden video camera on his clothes, a
Wildlife agent went to Wahchumwah's house and feigned interest in
buying feathers and pelts. Unsurprisingly, the agent did not have a
search warrant. Wahchumwah moved to suppress the video as an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, but the trial court denied his motion. On appeal before the Ninth Circuit, we filed an amicus brief in support of Wahchumwah. We highlighted the Supreme Court's January 2012 decision in United States v. Jones -- which
held that law enforcement's installation of a GPS device onto a car was
a "search" under the Fourth Amendment -- and specifically focused on
the concurring opinions of Justices Alito and Sotomayor, who were
worried about the power of technology to eradicate privacy. In our brief we argued that
although a person may reveal small bits of information publicly or to a
house guest, technology that allows the government to aggregate that
data in ways that were impractical in the past means that greater
judicial supervision and oversight is necessary. After all, a video
camera can capture far more detail than the human eye and is
specifically designed to allow the government to record, save and review
details for another day, bypassing the human mind's tendency to
forget. That means police need a search warrant to engage in the type of
invasive surveillance they did in Wahchumwah's house. Unconvinced, the Ninth Circuit instead relied on a case from 1966, Hoffa v. United States,
ruling that Wahchumwah forfeited his privacy interest when he
"voluntarily" revealed the interior of his home to the undercover
agent. But its conclusion contradicts not only the Supreme Court's
decision in Jones, but also earlier Ninth Circuit caselaw as well...more
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment