ONLY POT-GROWERS NEED FEAR HEAT-SENSING CAMERAS

The Supreme Court of Canada took a practical approach to surveillance
technology when it decided that police don't need to get a search
warrant before using heat-sensing cameras to check houses for signs of
illegal marijuana grow-ops. It also sent a very clear message that it
might not be so accommodating as the technology improves.

In a unanimous decision, the court overturned a lower court decision
written by its new colleague, Justice Rosalie Abella, when she was an
appeals court judge in Ontario. The Supreme Court decided that the
police did not invade a person's privacy unduly when they used an
infrared camera to look for hot spots in a house that could be a sign
that illegal drugs were being grown there.

The Supreme Court's ruling hinged on how much information gleaned by
an infrared camera trained on a house can say about what's going on
inside. Current technology can detect unusually high levels of heat
(possibly generated by halide lamps), but it can't reveal specific
details of what someone inside that house is doing.

Abella's lower court decision declaring the infrared surveys
unconstitutional anticipated improvements in the technology that would
make it possible someday to "see" inside a house. But Justice Ian
Binnie and his Supreme Court colleagues focused instead on the actual
state of technology, which did not unreasonably intrude on an
individual's privacy.

That said, Binnie made it clear that when the technology develops to
allow infrared cameras to detect actual activity inside a building,
"it will be a different case, and the courts will have to deal with
its privacy implications at that time in light of the facts as they
then exist."

Until then, marijuana growers will have reason to fear infrared
cameras, but the rest of us will not.