SUPREME COURT RULES THERMAL IMAGING IS A SEARCH

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that thermal
imaging to record the amount of heat emanating from a house, a police
practice often used to help detect illegal drugs, represented a search
covered by constitutional privacy protections.

The court's 5-4 ruling was a setback for the U.S. Justice Department ,
which argued the use of a thermal imager by law enforcement officers to
detect the heat emitted from a house was not a search and was not covered
by the privacy protections.

Justice Antonin Scalia said for the court majority that when the
government uses a device not in general public use to explore the details
of a private home that would previously been unknowable without physical
intrusion, the surveillance is a search and requires a warrant.

He said use of the device, aimed at a private home from a public street to
detect, constituted a search.

To withdraw such a minimum expectation of privacy against unreasonable
searches would permit ``police technology to erode the privacy'' guaranteed
by the Constitution, Scalia said.

Scalia rejected the Justice Department's argument that the thermal imaging
was constitutionally allowed because it did not detect ``intimate details.''

The case began with an investigation by William Elliott, an agent of the
U.S. Bureau of Land Management , into a possible conspiracy to grow
marijuana in Oregon.

Suspecting that Danny Kyllo might be involved, the agent examined Kyllo's
utility records and found he used an abnormally high amount of electricity
- -- which could suggest the use of intensity lights to grow marijuana in his
house.

Elliott then used a thermal imaging device from a parked car on a public
street and found that unusually high levels of heat were coming from the
roof of Kyllo's garage and one wall of his house. Kyllo's house emitted
more heat than the neighboring houses.

Only later did Elliott get a court warrant authorizing a search of the
house, where agents discovered an indoor marijuana-growing operation.

Kyllo pleaded guilty but moved to suppress the evidence recovered from the
search of his residence, arguing that the thermal imaging device
constituted an impermissible search.

A U.S. appeals court ruled that use of the imager did not constitute a search.

Scalia said the appeals court was wrong. He said the information obtained
by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search.

Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices John Paul
Stevens , Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy .