First Posted: 1/24/2015
JANUARY 23, 2015 — Lacking search warrants while using radar devices that look through walls to determine whether houses are occupied, some law enforcers reveal much more: yet another assault on Americans’ Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
At least 50 agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, have been using these devices for “more than two years with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used,” USA Today reports. Detecting “movements as slight as human breathing” from more than 50 feet and showing whether people inside a house are moving, the marshals’ devices can’t show pictures of what’s happening inside — but other devices can.
Developed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, these devices indeed have value for combat and hostage situations. But their warrantless use in law enforcement searches raises what federal appellate judges in Denver, considering such a case involving a parole violator’s arrest, called “grave Fourth Amendment questions.”
The Supreme Court has held the Fourth Amendment line against warrantless searches that use drug-sniffing dogs and thermal-imaging devices outside houses. When a warrantless radar-snooping test case arrives, which can’t happen soon enough, the justices must reaffirm the Fourth Amendment’s time-tested directive against law-enforcement overreach: Get a warrant.
