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Comment by blahblahblah | Hacker News Reader

You can't see the undercarriage of somebody's car in their driveway from the street nor can you see it flying over in a airplane and there is little doubt that the police would have placed the device in a well hidden place on the car's undercarriage so that it would not be noticed by the owner of the vehicle. So, what they did fails the test you cite. Ergo, an expectation of privacy exists.

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But you're not observing the underside of his car as if peeking up a lady's dress; you're just observing where he goes, which is as old as following footprints in the dirt. The main difference is that GPS vastly increases productivity compared to more conventional methods.

Now I do agree that one does not expect to have tracking devices or anything else covertly attached to one's car, any more than one expects to have the locks picked. But courts take the opposite view. Attaching a device like this to the underside of a car is held not to constitute a trespass, in turn based on Supreme Court rulings that hiding a tracking device inside a container does not violate the 4th amendment - yes, it trespasses on the person's property, but they still have the use of it so no 'seizure' has occurred. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1604019454511858...

More troubling to me is the fact that in this case the defendant had not been read his rights after being arrested, and said he felt he had no choice but to consent to a search of his home: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9066796837449085...

'seizure' is not the issue. 'search' is the issue.

No it isn't. They're not searching for anything on the underside of his car, either factually or legally. 'Seizure' does not just mean taking something in the legal sense, it can mean altering it to the owner's detriment.

The standard for what can be lawfully seen is not written assuming the view of a 6' tall male. A person can lay down on the sidewalk, an area he can freely occupy, and gain a whole new vision of a person's property, including under a vehicle.

I can lay down on a sidewalk so as to achieve a better viewing angle through someone's window to see a poster on a ceiling inside of a house and still not fail the cases that I cited.

As I said in my other posts, I don't agree with the law, but that is the law.

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