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Comment by henryfjordan | Hacker News Reader

No, the ruling goes out of it's way to say that putting something on the front seat of a car doesn't provide an expectation of privacy. Your home is very different in the eyes of the law. You can't use IR cameras to see into a home already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

Edit: After re-reading, I think you may have a point that Wifi is a commonly-used technology and might technically be allowed. It might depend on whether your phone or wifi router could be used as a detector with the right software. I'd imagine the supreme court might change the standard if that happened though. They generally treat the home as more sacred.

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au contraire. cops can do literally whatever they want and they routinely use parallel construction to get a conviction within the letter of the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

believing anything else is incredibly naive.

Why not use spy satellites and just watch you all the time? Or clever Van Eck, or Wifi micro-disturbances?

Cops are basically plumbers. They are blue collar workers, making mediocre pay and working insane hours. (Plumbers actually make MORE than cops for their 40, cops just work a lot of overtime...) Cops are most likely to just not really chase an investigation versus doing twice the work to use some kind of illegal evidence gathering.

Cops get away with stuff they shouldn’t: details at 11.

That said, I just want to point out that you have no idea whether they believe that or are simply quoting the relevant legal history. What’s with the naive comment?

Every time I see something like this I have to think it contributes to degrading discussion quality here; we can probably assume the general audience of this site are not obtuse on this matter and wade in with a different tone.

> history

thanks that sums my point up in a single cherry picked word.

As long as the material presented in court is acquired via legal methods, no laws are being broken, are they? Now, if officers use legal loopholes to take illegally-acquired evidence and somehow make it legal, that's a practice that should be rooted out and those involved prosecuted. But as long as officers can construct a legal case completely independent of the poisonous tree, what's the issue?

If they were only able to construct a "legal" case through the knowledge gained by the fruit of a poisonous tree, then the new tree should be treated as tainted as well. But that's not the law.

They can and do violate the law (without consequence) until they find a foothold that allows them to fabricate the appearance of a legally obtained chain of evidence. Then, they fully suppress the evidence about how that information was originally obtained.

That’s a perfectly logical stance to take, but I think it hinges on :

”Now, if officers use legal loopholes to take illegally-acquired evidence and somehow make it legal, that's a practice that should be rooted out and those involved prosecuted.”

If in practice illegal practices, are not rooted-out or prosecuted, and actually condoned, I think one would need to look askance at the entire concept…

That makes perfect sense. I'm no lawyer and am only discussing this out of idle curiosity, so I'm sure my comments were a naive take. The situation I'm envisioning is an audio recording from a 2-party consent state outlining the existence of evidence. Since that cannot be the legal basis of a warrant, an officer might wander through the neighborhood talking with associated citizens to try and independently establish the need for a warrant based on various witness statements. No evidence has been falsified or created out of thin air, and there's no hope of a conviction if the suspected building doesn't contain damning evidence.

However, I fully recognize how such a process might be abused and the need for a very firm legal hand to avoid accidentally becoming an authoritarian state.

The officer has no probable cause to do what you suggest without the illegally obtained information in the first place.

There’s two aspects to this ruling. The first is the “commonly used technology” but the second is the “expectation of privacy”.

The Wi-Fi in a house thing may pass the bar for tech but doesn’t pass the bar w/r/t your expectation of privacy.

But would be very good to get a legal precedent set for wifi, if there’s not one already, since it’s extremely ubiquitous and ripe for abuse

What about the trunk of your car?

You have an expectation of privacy for the contents of your trunk, but it's less firm than that of your house --- your trunk can be searched without a warrant to "inventory" it if it's merely impounded, without suspicion or an arrest.

If the police had a device that enabled them to see into car trunks, it would likely constitute a search requiring "reasonableness" to use it.

Which it should be noted, they do. Semi-truck sized x-ray machines exist, especially at border control, but also elsewhere, and is used to see inside of semi-trucks. Using that same device against a car seems entirely feasible. But as you point out, if they impound the vehicle, they can just inventory the trunk directly, assuming they have the key. If you have a locked safe in the trunk, I don't think they're (legally) allowed to x-ray it to find out what's inside of that, although they can parallel-reconstrution their way to having a reason after the fact.

Since the time of the founders, you've had essentially no rights to privacy at border crossings.

"Parallel construction" is a message board argument. At the point where you've decided the law doesn't matter, we can just stop talking about this stuff, because none of it matters.

Parallel construction isn't the theoretical stuff of paranoid hackers on online message boards. In a 2013 statement, it was revealed that the DEA uses parallel reconstruction "almost daily" to build criminal cases using evidence gathered by the NSA.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013...

Yes, yes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It seems very unlikely that anybody parallel constructed anything here, since an officer was able to see the guns with the assistance of a visor made of his fingers.

Under what conditions is a car impounded? For a car to be impounded it already was somewhere it shouldn't have been or the driver themselves impaired in some way. Of course they need to be able to search trunks in such a case.

> For a car to be impounded it already was somewhere it shouldn't have been or the driver themselves impaired in some way. Of course they need to be able to search trunks in such a case.

It could simply have been in a car accident and its driver taken to hospital. It may even have been off the road by the time it was towed to the impound. I see this happen several times a week.

I parked an old beater that was full of my personal belongings (finishing up a move) a few years ago in front of a family members house. I accidently left the keys in the ignition but off. The police impounded it within hours claiming they thought it was abandoned; letting them skip their usual 48 hour wait time for nuisance vehicles.

I would have not been happy if that was searched and inventoried.

What about a mobile home?

Does the expectation of privacy go up and down depending if the mobile home is driving?

Interesting.

Wiki says this is specific to thermals, which operate ~1,000-14,000nm. I wonder if it would also be applicable to night vision? Those are sensitive ~500-900nm. Visible light is ~400-700nm.

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