10 ms·
This article turns into a rant after the first few paragraphs, leaving me confused about the actual facts behind the story. Is it legal for the government to se
by Ansil849 5y ago
This article turns into a rant after the first few paragraphs, leaving me confused about the actual facts behind the story. Is it legal for the government to setup surveillance cameras on someone's land, to monitor their land? From the article, it sounds like this is exactly what was done.
- op00to 5y agoIf it’s not immediately adjacent to a persons home, apparently so.
- throwthere 5y agoMy money is on no, the cameras were not on his property. The article says the spy cameras were “placed the within the boundaries of where he lives, farms and hunts.” Since the column piece is written by the complainant/affiliate my guess is the cameras were close to his land but on public property around the river and pointed at his property.
- dylan604 5y ago> “placed the within the boundaries of where he lives, farms and hunts.” I recognize the words, but that is a really strained sentence structure. What are they trying to say? Placed within the boundaries sounds like my property. If I'm roaming my property and find something there that I did not put there, then I'm going to be taking it down. I'll probably even attempt to sell it.
- wslack 5y agoIt sounds like they are trying to imply it was his land without actually stating as such (because it was likely just over the property border).
- dylan604 5y agoAs long as it "just" over the property line then I guess it's not really his property then? Doubt the tax assessor gives them a break on the "just" over part of it. Are we really trying to say that property lines are gray areas? If I build my fence just over the line onto my neighbor's property, that'd be okay then, right? This straining to justify the trespassing to place an illegal wiretap is just mind boggling.
- rfrey 5y agoI think your parent meant "just over" in the opposite direction, e.g. just outside his property.
- dylan604 5y agoi guess that could be read that way now that you mention it. totally didn't take it that way in my jumping to conclusions. so, now that we've established it could be not on your property but absolutely most definitely viewing your property, time for action. Time for a sheet of plywood blocking the view. Now, knowing that it's probably an extremely wide angle lens, that playwood probably won't block the full view. Time for a bright ass light on that board that just so happens to point at the camera. Maybe a UV LED lights to make it not as annoying in case that light is too disturbing. Or, a laser light show attached to that piece of plywood that just happnes to scan back and forth across the camera lens several times at alternating heights.
- brewdad 5y agoAs if they can't come and move the camera. I suppose eventually you could build your plywood wall around the entire perimeter of the property. In the suburbs we call that a privacy fence. A bit more costly to build on such a large plot of land however.
- dylan604 5y agoOkay, so now I'm starting to wonder if I'm just a sick mind or if others are just really not very creative. So you go and move the piece of plywood. It costs the US Gov't much more money to move the thing than it will you. Stick it to the man. Plus, each time you move it, you can update the messages you've spray painted onto that piece of plywood. "Hello Mr Secret Agent Man!" "Isn't it a lovely day to be viewing my property?" "How about you go and..."
- phrz 5y agoThe current state of the open fields doctrine is that your home and its "curtilage" are protected, but the "open fields" beyond that are not. The wording "lives, farms and hunts" suggests that area is his curtilage because it is where he takes part in the activities of private life. Property bounds are not really relevant because 4th amendment privacy rights and property rights are not co-extensive.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago"Boundaries of where he lives, farms and hunts” makes me think they carped bombed the whole area, including a whole bunch of private property that was his and other people's. Basically nobody farms public lands. A lot of people farm their neighbor's land. And as other commenters have pointed out, there isn't a 1:1 mapping between "not your property" and "where the .gov can stick a camera without a warrant".
- dylan604 5y agoThere's actually legal government documents that quite literally state where your property is. Any property that is not defined as your property is not your property. It's really not a hard topic.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoYou don't get it. Just because it's not your property doesn't mean the .gov can plop a camera there without a warrant. They can't stick a camera on a pole in an empty lot directly across from your house for the purposes of surveilling your house without a warrant. Of course they can try and weasel around that but that's for the court to determine.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoeither that or if they wrote it themselves they thought, man these jerks don't know who they're dealing with! I am going to write so smart here they'll be sorry they ever messed with me! It takes an extremely disciplined mind to write well when angry about the thing one is writing about, otherwise you risk being completely unclear.
- chaircher 5y agomight be to articulate the privacy issues. As in, the cameras aren't just technically on his property but they're filming his whole life
- mod 5y agoI had the opposite takeaway from the text; that is, that the cameras were, in fact, on his property. The quote you cited is just referencing his property, I think they said 163 acres.
- stefan_ 5y agoSurely we can just resolve this by looking at the actual complaint instead of trying to divine sense from some words like it's a party manifesto from Xi? Here it is, then: https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Tennessee-Open-Fields-Complaint-Final.pdf https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Tennessee-Open-Fie... The graphic on page 11 seems to indeed show the camera on the property.
- kingcharles 5y agoInteresting that he filed this only under his State's constitution in State court. I don't see why he couldn't have made a 4th Am. challenge under federal law too, and filed in federal court. Although they may have passed on the State law aspect if they deemed it too complex. A county court judge is woefully under-skilled and will almost certainly side with authorities and bump this to the appellate courts for a more in-depth legal examination. Do we know if he has a collateral federal case?
- antognini 5y agoSome states have stronger protections in their state constitutions than the federal constitution provides. Montana, for instance, explicitly provides a right to privacy, whereas a "right to privacy" is at best implicit in the US Constitution. I don't know anything about the Tennessean Constitution to say if that's the reason though.
- kingcharles 5y agoI looked at it real quick, it's not one of the states that copy-pastes the 4th Am like a lot do, but it also doesn't seem to offer up any extra protections like some states do, as you mention.
- saberdancer 5y agoThat graphic is quite bad. Not all markers follow the same logic. For the "Terry's Gate" the white line seems to point to the location of the gate, while when showing homes they do not point to homes but use the icon to designate location. Depending on what they used for TWRA Camera the camera may or may not be located on the property. I am leaning toward not on the property as there is no real reason why they would point outside of the property with the white line unless they wanted to show where it actually was.
- judge2020 5y agoEven if something is placed on government-owned land (eg. a river), they're still bound by the fourth amendment and they can't use security cameras that surveil where the owner/person has a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. Whether or not that means the owner of the land has such expectation on hundreds of acres depends on how secure the location is; you could make the argument "anyone could legally boat down the river and see them, therefore there is not an expectation of privacy", or you could make the argument that cameras installed at an unreasonably high elevation (eg. the top of a tree on the river) would be surveilling land that nobody not trespassing could see. This is also assuming you have a legal fence/barrier that informs anyone trespassing isn't allowed, otherwise it'd be harder to claim treading the land and setting up 'wildlife cameras' is trespassing.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"Is it legal for the government to setup surveillance cameras on someone's land, to monitor their land?" That is about to be found out in court. "Although the case is proceeding in state court under the authority of the Tennessee Constitution, the central claims point to a nationwide problem. Starting about 100 years ago.." But the issue behind, is a more complicated one.
- cronix 5y agoIt will also likely soon become moot as drones get cheaper and cheaper, and you don't own the sky over your land. Here's a company, Brinc, building border security drones which the promo video also says can also easily be used for prisons, data centers and just about anything else. https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/brinc-startup-taser-drones-migrants/ https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/brinc-startup-taser-dron...
- hutzlibu 5y agoBut if a private person may not fly over private property of other people, than that rule should apply for government personal, too - unless a warrant, or "special rules". And they can be changed by the people.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoIt boils down to: 'environmental'/game officers have sometimes very shocking levels of power because of the nature of their job, but the article is correct that the supreme court has been steadily eroding our privacy rights for the better part of at least half a century. The game warden probably doesn't give a shit about your weed (unless you were high/drunk while carrying/using a firearm); he cares about whether you shot a deer when you weren't supposed to. Game is a public resource and we're sufficiently populated these days, and weapons sufficiently advanced, that unchecked hunting can decimate wildlife populations. What bothers me more is that a massive portion of the US population falls under the zone wherein Customs and Border Protection can do almost whatever they want. It's something like 100 miles from the border. Imagine driving down a street in NYC and a customs agent pops out of nowhere, stops you, disassembles most of your car's interior, demands the password to your phone and computer under threat of jailing, and then heads off with your phone, laptop, any papers you had, and the $6,000 in cash you were carrying to buy a used car. 100% legal, as far as the supreme court is concerned. I wonder if any justices have realized that their courthouse and homes are within that same zone they think the constitution doesn't apply.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Game is a public resource and we're sufficiently populated these days, and weapons sufficiently advanced, that unchecked hunting can decimate wildlife populations. Sure, but that was true thousands of years ago too. It doesn't take much. If you're willing to draw the obvious conclusion from the fact that mass extinction of large animals has occurred every time humans were introduced somewhere, it's always been true.
- Ansil849 5y ago> What bothers me more is that a massive portion of the US population falls under the zone wherein Customs and Border Protection can do almost whatever they want. It's something like 100 miles from the border. I definitely agree that this 100-mile reach is egregious overreach, but have there ever been any cases of this being actually abused, such as in the scenario you describe? Or for instance, have CBP agents ever busted into someone's home?
- Hnrobert42 5y agoYeah. I stopped reading after it after it called case law a “judge made law.” Inflammatory rhetoric like that tells you all you need to know about their journalistic ethics.
- dannyobrien 5y agoThey're his lawyers, not journalists.
- azinman2 5y agoThen they should know even better that judges don’t make laws, they rule on existing laws, and their rulings get used as precedent. I came here to complain about exactly that. I wish people could argue on actual facts and not politically brand everything in sight.
- CamperBob2 5y agoThen they should know even better that judges don’t make laws, they rule on existing laws, and their rulings get used as precedent. In the US, our system of law is based on our Constitution, in this case the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Like several other amendments, this one is written vaguely enough to allow outrageous interpretations by biased or incompetent judges. This is one of those situations. If you can look into Fourth Amendment law without growing steadily sick to your stomach, you're either on the government's side or you have a stronger stomach than mine.
- betwixthewires 5y agoWell, I think what they're getting at is what people call "legislating from the bench", the fourth amendment very clearly protects people from government snooping and seizure without a warrant from a judge, deliberately broad or lax interpretations of things happen in court all the time for whatever reason. Setting a precedent that the fourth amendment doesn't apply to your land outside your house and things like that are very obvious examples of this sort of thing.
- 5y ago
- tablespoon 5y ago> This article turns into a rant after the first few paragraphs, leaving me confused about the actual facts behind the story. Is it legal for the government to setup surveillance cameras on someone's land, to monitor their land? From the article, it sounds like this is exactly what was done. Yeah, the linked article is garbage. You have to follow one of the links to even find the most basic facts about the case from the headline (like what agency put up the cameras and why): https://ij.org/case/tennessee-open-fields/ https://ij.org/case/tennessee-open-fields/: > Officers from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) routinely enter private land on a whim to search for potential hunting violations. They don’t have probable cause to believe a crime is being committed, and they don’t ask permission from either property owners or a court. Instead, they trespass, wander around as they please, and take photos and videos. They even install cameras so they can keep watching the properties 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- User23 5y agoGame wardens have shockingly broad authority. It goes back to the English common law. You don’t actually own land you just hold it fee simple and the Crown, or the State in America, actually has the right to all game. They can even enter your house without a warrant to, for example, check freezers. And if they find anything you’d have best tagged it properly. However all the game wardens I know aren’t looking to just randomly harass people. There is usually a good reason when they go after someone, like shooting from a motor vehicle on the road.
- TechBro8615 5y agoCan you cite the legal authority that exempts game wardens from the restrictions imposed on the executive by the constitution? For example, the fourth amendment protects US citizens from warrentless searches. Does this not apply to searches of your property by game wardens? I understand that English common law may have this notion of “lease holding” (if you buy property in the UK you’re technically renting it for 999 years from the queen). However, America is not England and in this country you actually own your property (and in many states can defend it with lethal force). So where is this authority coming from?
- redis_mlc 5y ago> Is it legal for the government to setup surveillance cameras on someone's land, to monitor their land? No, a warrant is needed for a permanent camera. The exception is if the camera was on public land and the private area observed was easily visible from street-level, for example. They can use surveillance aircraft with infrared imaging to identify grow operations though. (There was an HN post around a year ago about police using a streetlamp to peer over a fence into a private residence, so check that out.) Unfortunately US police across all jurisdictions are so lazy that they keep trying this, all the way up to FISA courts.
- avs733 5y agoJust to be clear…it’s not a news article, it’s an editorial. There’s a small “opinion” tag at the top that gets kind of overwhelmed by all the ads.