The Glade 4.0

A warrant should be required to record location. And, regardless of what DE thinks, you do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your vehicle. And window tinting has a negligible impact on car safety. The rules are for "plain sight" assistance.

Hmmm....

I'm not sure where the idea comes from that homes have some kind of special status not confered upon other personal property, but it certainly doesn't come from the 4th Amendment. It makes no distinction between the various kinds of personal property.

I don't necessarily have any problems with "in plain sight" doctrine in general. However, with respect to cars, I submit that passing a law which prohibits window tinting that would obscure the interior of the car from plain sight is no different than passing a law which requires that people's homes be made of glass so that police will be able to see inside without a warrant.

The argument that they need to be able to see if someone inside the vehicle is about to take violent action against them is disingenuous at best. The same conditions would apply when police approach homes and buildings, and yet we don't prohibit fully tinted/reflective windows on buildings and homes, nor require that every room of the house be plainly visible from the exterior. That justification is based on the unsupportable premise that a vehicle, as a private property, somehow has less status under the fourth amendment than a home.

Further, I submit that any law requiring that personal property be made involuntarily open to plain sight is functionally equivalent to a warrantless search.

Slippery Slope is only a fallacy when based on conjecture. Applying observed historical action in similar cases is a form of evidence not conjecture.

That being said even ignoring that - this allows tracking within areas given strict privacy (a gated private residence) which would normally require a warrant. Same standard.

Yes it is true. If I can show that slicing a neck with a piece of glass has a historical 40% chance of killing someone and a20% chance of nerve damage it is not a slippery slope to state that cutting someone's neck has a good chance of severely injuring them.

If on the other hand I say that legalizing gay marriage will lead to interspecies marriage while having zero historical evidence - that is a slippery slope fallacy.

The officer's safety is more important than any desire to put on tint for privacy.

TGPS the way it was used is technology that enhances surveillance. The act of watching and following someone doesn't require a court order and gps data merely allows for less opportunity of detection.

"Any area between the property line and the building restriction line shall be considered as private property set aside and treated as public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner."

Basically what that means is most property owners in the District don't own the land between their front door and the sidewalk, but they are responsible for taking care of it. It's why you can get a ticket for drinking beer on your front porch in the Nation's Capital. You're technically on public space. It's also why the city can ticket you for parking in your own driveway if you don't pull your car deep enough into the driveway beyond the façade of your house or building.

[...] GPS is a vastly different and exponentially more sophisticated and powerful technology that is easily and cheaply deployed and has virtually unlimited and remarkably precise tracking capability. With the addition of new GPS satellites, the technology is rapidly improving so that any person or object, such as a car, may be tracked with uncanny accuracy to virtually any interior or exterior location, at any time and regardless of atmospheric conditions. Constant, relentless tracking of anything is now not merely possible but entirely practicable, indeed much more practicable than the surveillance conducted in [United States v. Knotts (460 US 276 [1983])]. GPS is not a mere enhancement of human sensory capacity, it facilitates a new technological perception of the world in which the situation of any object may be followed and exhaustively recorded over, in most cases, a practically unlimited period. The potential for a similar capture of information or "seeing" by law enforcement would require, at a minimum, millions of additional police officers and cameras on every street lamp.

That such a surrogate technological deployment is not -- particularly when placed at the unsupervised discretion of agents of the state "engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime" (Johnson v United States, 333 US 10, 14 [1948]) -- compatible with any reasonable notion of personal privacy or ordered liberty would appear to us obvious. One need only consider what the police may learn, practically effortlessly, from planting a single device. The whole of a person's progress through the world, into both public and private spatial spheres, can be charted and recorded over lengthy periods possibly limited only by the need to change the transmitting unit's batteries. Disclosed in the data retrieved from the transmitting unit, nearly instantaneously with the press of a button on the highly portable receiving unit, will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. What the technology yields and records with breathtaking quality and quantity, is a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations -- political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few -- and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits. When multiple GPS devices are utilized, even more precisely resolved inferences about our activities are possible. And, with GPS becoming an increasingly routine feature in cars and cell phones, it will be possible to tell from the technology with ever increasing precision who we are and are not with, when we are and are not with them, and what we do and do not carry on our persons -- to mention just a few of the highly feasible empirical configurations.

This could, if someone was so inclined, be a lot of fun... attach GPS units to police cars and start recording their where about and travel patterns.... Think of all the great things that could accomplished by enterprising individuals who now know the location of police cars.

Imagine the **** storm that will occur when the police decide this isn't such a great idea... like say with recording police officers. Oh wait... video taping police that are in plain view is against the law...

I love the hypocrisy.

However, the placing of the GPS transmitter itself would (in my opinion) certainly constitute violation of reasonable expectation of privacy. Just because it obtains information that other conventional means would and it obtains information that in and of itself isn't established to be protected under the idea of a "reasonable expectation of property" (your location in public) matters not.

Isn't that what I just said?

Ladas++

Except that videotaping police that are in plain view isn't against the law

The thing that really bugs me about this isn't even the privacy thing (although that does bug me) it's the tampering with my car part. Nobody who isn't me (or authorized by me) should be attaching anything to my car (that includes those shitty adhesive envelopes they use to attach tickets to your car around here).

I would agree with this if it involved anything actually visible without special effort to find it, or if it damaged the car in any way.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin