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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

> the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US.

Maybe not under that term, but for example, almost the only place an American's 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure apply is in their home. Law enforcement can search their garbage at the curb, monitor their [edit: public] movements via camera and license plate monitoring, etc., look them up online, all without warrants [*]. They can't do that in someone's home.

[*] I'm pretty sure no warrant is required to search curbside trash or do most online research.

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The distinction here is whether police can secretly enter a home to plant bugs, &c. In the US, this is routine; in Germany, this is (was?) taboo.

(FYI, you can escape * as \* to get it to display as *).

Thanks for the tip!

Is this even practical anymore? A non-technical person can set up video surveillance on their home for a couple hundred bucks. Why wouldn't a criminal do that? I think the days of the FBI planting a microphone in a lamp on Tony Soprano's basement are over.

I read in the papers that the cheap cameras are over wifi, so thieves are using wifi jammers to take them offline during the heist.

It's hard to set up video surveillance in your home without inadvertently providing much of the surveillance data the law enforcement officers were after, especially for non-technical people.

Good point!

The FBI has an array of readymade zero day exploits, it is probably able to handle Tony Sporano's Chinese knockoff video survelliance

I think the "inviolability" thing is useful just to understand what's actually happening here, but it's also important to understand that the US and Germany have very different criminal justice, search, and evidentiary systems. Germany doesn't have an exclusionary rule for evidence, for instance.

The boundaries of your "home" varies by State. For example, in some States the interior of your car is part of your home even when not at home, which occasionally has entertaining implications.

> the interior of your car is part of your home

Especially when you exclusively enter and exit the car inside your garage! /s

This article is not about warrantless searches of homes, though. In America, courts can and do order the police to secretly enter a domicile and install surveillance devices.

It also appears this Herman law allows “no knock” search warrants, which in the US are generally considered more serious and more restricted.

The trash search thing varies by state at least.

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