WHAT YOUR HOUSE CAN TELL THE POLICE

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.