TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Idiotic decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

So let’s see if I have this right: the police can walk onto my property, place a GPS tracking device on my car, and track me indefinitely, because I don’t have an expectation of privacy on my driveway? What the hell sense does that make?

Their conclusion not only doesn’t logically follow from their premise, but it has no relevance to it whatever. While I do not expect to have privacy on my driveway—that is, I wouldn’t do anything I don’t want publicly visible—my driveway is my property, and thus I have the right to decide who can and cannot access it. If I don’t consent to the police being on my driveway, and they don’t have a warrant, then they cannot be there. And they sure as hell don’t have a right to place a tracking device on my car.

This ruling is, if allowed to stand, incredibly dangerous. This basically makes it legal for the government to track everyone’s location at any given time, whether they are reasonably suspected of a crime or not. This is one giant leap toward a police state.