January 25, 2012
A unanimous Supreme Court decision against GPS tracking that still leaves wiggle room for the police
Jacob Sullum on the very narrow grounds used by the majority to decide US v. Jones:
“If you win this case,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben during oral argument in U.S. v. Jones last fall, “there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” That prospect, Breyer said, “sounds like 1984.”
Fortunately, the government did not win the case. But the Court’s unanimous decision, announced on Monday, may not delay Breyer’s 1984 scenario for long. Unless the Court moves more boldly to restrain government use of new surveillance technologies, the Framers’ notion of a private sphere protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures” will become increasingly quaint.
[. . .]
The majority therefore concluded that it was unnecessary to resolve the question of whether Jones had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding his travels on public roads. By contrast, the four other justices, in an opinion by Samuel Alito, said he did, given that investigators tracked all his movements for a month — a kind of surveillance that can reveal a great deal of information about sensitive subjects such as medical appointments, psychiatric treatment, and political, religious, or sexual activities.
While Scalia’s approach draws a clear line that cops may not cross without a warrant, it does not address surveillance technologies that involve no physical intrusion, such as camera networks, satellites, drone aircraft, and GPS features in cars and smart phones. If police had tracked Jones by activating an anti-theft beacon or following his cell phone signal, they could have obtained the same evidence without touching his property.
The obvious mash-up: Minecraft and Lego
It’s just a brief mention in The Register, but if you’ve ever seen a Minecraft game in progress, the connection is pretty hard to miss:
Lego has given the green light to a set of the famous building bricks based on the world of the cult cyber-block game Minecraft.
The idea came from fan submission site Lego Cuusoo, where users can suggest new creation kits. If these submissions gather sufficient interest among the site’s visitors, the Danish toy maker takes note and sometimes agrees to take the concept to retail.
It’s amusing to think that the next generation of Lego users may consider it to be a spin-off of Minecraft for use offline.
Lorne Gunter: The long-gun registry was broken from the start
Writing in the National Post, Lorne Gunter points out that the long-gun registry was even less useful than we thought:
Last month, the RCMP and Statistics Canada were forced to admit that they don’t keep statistics relating to the number of violent gun crimes in Canada that are committed by licensed gun owners using registered guns.
“Please note,” Statistics Canada wrote in response to an access to information request filed by the National Firearms Association, “that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police.” Nor does StatsCan’s annual homicide survey “collect information on the registration status of the firearm used to commit a homicide.”
This raises the question: Why did it take so long for the government to begin ridding Canada of the horribly expensive, unjustifiably intrusive federal gun registry? If no one in Ottawa had any systematic way of tracking whether or not Canadians suspected of committing a violent gun crime were licensed to own a gun and had registered the gun being used, then they had no way of knowing whether registration and licensing were having a positive impact on crime.
There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There’s another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)
Even if you grant the original notion that the government had an overriding need to track gun ownership (over and above the user licensing scheme that pre-dated the registry by decades), this can only count as a waste of time, money, and effort.
