At 05:02 PM 06/14/2001 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, cubic-dog wrote [incorrectly--wcs]
This type of surveillence is allowed without warrent because it is non-invasive.
How can any sort of search be 'non-invasive'?
Looking in your car windows is non-invasive. Looking in your house windows with binoculars is non-invasive - you're shipping photons to the public outside world, and they're just picking them up the way they'd go through your garbage cans, which is also non-invasive. Shining bright spotlights in your windows at night to see through your curtains is probably invasive. Looking through your house walls with infrared goggles strikes me as really tacky but in some sense non-invasive. It's nice that the Supremes decided that seeing through walls without a warrant is not ok, because normal people can't see through walls, but it actually was a bit of a stretch. And technology has moved from night-vision goggles being used Russian military equipment at gun shows to $100 things you can buy at Fry's (which work outside but don't see through walls), but soon enough anybody will be able to see through walls if there's enough market. (Anybody can already do that just like police can now, but the hardware's expensive enough that most people don't bother. Steven Wright has a line about "I couldn't tell if they were cops or just people dressed up as cops, but that's really all that cops are anyway...")