SNOOPING WITHOUT WARRANTS

The Supreme Court 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 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) in general, but it can't reveal specific details of what
someone inside that house is doing.

Justice Abella's lower-court decision declaring the infrared surveys
unconstitutional anticipated improvements in that 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, Justice 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.