China expands surveillance of sewage to police illegal drug use

>claims it's a practice from Europe

They've been doing this for a while in some European countries, yeah.

You'd think it would eventually come up in a court case.

Granted they could use the data and then somehow make up an excuse for coming up with another reason to observe something but that too would be kinda clunky and obvious and would come up.

Kyllo v United States created a bright line test: new technology used to view "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion"[1] count as a "search" if and only if the technology is not "in general public use"[2]. Since the general public does not generally use technologies for detecting trace amounts of specific chemicals, this should require a warrant.

Current technologies that are heading towards losing 4th Amendment protection might be IR thermal cameras and trigger-word based audio recording (Alexa et al). The general public is increasingly using both of these technologies. When someone convinces a judge the "general public use" threshold has been crossed, the technology in general (not just a specific product) can be used without a warrant.

[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html

[2] Ibid.

I'm going to totally guess and say that if the effluence uses public assets (town sewer) then it's okay for gov to monitor and do whatever and thus get a warrant based on probable cause if they get a good hit on location. If you have a septic on private land, then, I presume they can't just come and check your system for tell-tales of drugs.

But that's just a guess...

It's a contentious issue.

There's (sort of) precedent in the form of court rulings on police search of garbage cans. Apparently, in 1998, the 7th circuit court of appeals ruled 8-5 holding that the individual cannot reasonably expect privacy of their trash left in publicly accessible areas. [1]

1: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1200020.html

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Greenwood

  California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988),
  was a case in which the Supreme Court of the
  United States held that the Fourth Amendment
  does not prohibit the warrantless search and
  seizure of garbage left for collection outside
  the curtilage of a home.

I remember this comment.

I think there were objections about the feasibility and precision of these methods, when in reality those concerns just don't matter at all.

Raided the wrong house/neighborhood? I doubt the victim could do anything tangible about it. Even better, this is another tool in the box of vague reasons to search a place that can be just made up.

The most practical way to prevent detection (if you're that worried) is to do your business in toilets that are in some way public. Your school, your job, the train station (if it has regularly cleaned toilets), etc.

London has a pretty big problem with raw sewage flowing into the Thames too, fortunately it’s not used as drinking water source though.

Each year at least 40m litres of untreated sewage flows into the Thames in London, as the Victoria sewers are at capacity. There is currently an ongoing project to upgrade them which should be launched in 2022:

http://www.tideway.london/

Last year a water company was fined £20m for dumping 2 billion litres over the last few years further upstream:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/22/thames-w...

"The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay / They drink at lunch in San José."

Seems like Tom Lehrer's Pollution is still relevant - just other countries.

Seriously, though. Given all the things drug addicts often do if driven to them, is it wise to give them an incentive to, say, poop into a bag and eventually throw it into someone else's trash?

I was wondering whether the technology was at the level where it could track it down to an individual. Struck me as implausible, but then the article says "policing" and that it was successfully used to "help track down" a manufacturer, but further thought shows that "help track down" might just mean "it helped narrow it down to a neighborhood" or something.

I'm sure they wouldn't install in every apartment things that take samples at every different tenant's toilets. But they might take very broad samples, and then, when they find positive results in one area, they could add more sampling to its sub-areas, and narrow it down progressively, and eventually say "We now have cause to search the rooms of everyone in this apartment building for drugs".

I remember reading back in the Bush era that when he travelled abroad he used a porta-potty so the Russians couldn't analyze his poo.

No wonder it is so popular in San Francisco.

This actually seems just barely within the realm of possibility of something a privacy bulwark like Richard Stallman could support