TIME.com: Nation -- Supreme Court: Relax. The Heat is Off

[Bill Stewart]

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...")