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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

It might be useful to have the full story behind Aereo. If I recall correctly, they are trying to serve as an Antenna outsourcing service of sorts - you pay them to house your antenna and they let you watch TV from anywhere you have an internet connection.

From a consumer's point of view, seems very reasonable and convenient. A Dropbox for public TV of sorts.

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That is one way to look at Aereo; the other way to look at it is that unlike a DVR, which is a gadget that consumers buy and use to enhance the way they consume broadcast signals, Aereo completely repackages the broadcast itself, copies the content, and delivers it in a new form that Aereo can profit from but that the content producers can't.

I tend more towards your perspective, for whatever it's worth.

That is basically it. Aereo is not doing any one thing you could not do yourself, but the conglomeration is a little gray.

As an admittedly poor analogy, the police can follow you around without a warrant. They can't, however, slap a GPS tracker on everybody's car and follow ten million people around simultaneously. The law is interpreted by people, and they consider things like scale, scope, automation, intent, etc.

That's a very interesting detail (sorry taking discussion a bit off track), but as UAV technology compresses and shifts to commodity scale, Police could potentially have a robot "follow" you around without warrant. It would seem that the original intent of the provision limiting surveillance gets circumvented.

The principal that prevents the police from attaching GPS devices to your car has less to do with the scope of surveillance and more to do with the fact that the police have to violate your personal property to accomplish it.

I think some expansion of this statement is in order. As far as settled SCOTUS cases go, the only reason why police need a warrant to attach a GPS to your car is because they must "sieze" the car (for however brief a time) in order to attach the device. As you alude to, it has nothing to do with the surveillance itself. However this is far from a settled issue. At least 4 out of the 9 SCOTUS justices support a new Fourth Amendment theory called the "mosaic theory", introduced by Alito in US v. Jones (2012). Under this theory, courts would evaluate the actions by government in aggregate to determine if the actions constituted a search. Under such a doctrine, 24 hour GPS surveillance on public roadways may well be illegal without a warrant. This theory has been criticized by some academics as too difficult of an analysis for the courts to handle. Yet it does show that the justices are indeed considering the scope of surveillance and some of them are trying to figure out a way to limit the scope using Fourth Amendment analysis. Alito in particular seems worried about it and he has found support for at least some of his ideas from Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor

Makes you wonder if the court would have upheld the police GPS tracking if the guy had just been parked on the street instead of his driveway the night they bugged his car.

I don't subscribe to cable TV (Roku or Mac Mini connected TVs works 4 me) and the antenna service I have in my area is very lacking.

I am excited about Aereo as it is a service I would subscribe to, as well it or something like it will force copyright to offer live local channels via the web.

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