WE, THE PEOPLE, NEED TO PAY ATTENTION

We, the people, don't always follow court rulings.

We, the people, don't always keep up with what federal agencies are doing.

So while we, the people, aren't looking, we are losing our rights.

While we were sleeping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals --
which covers California and eight other states -- decided it was OK
for agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to sneak
into a guy's driveway and put a GPS tracking device under the bottom
of his car. The wise judges said that the agents did not need a
warrant because the guy's driveway wasn't private.

That kind of thinking -- that you should have no expectation of
privacy in your driveway -- is now law in nine states.

The DEA agents in the case acted in 2007 in Oregon against Juan
Pineda-Moreno. They believed he was growing marijuana, so they went
to his trailer and stuck a tracker on the Jeep parked a few feet away.

And a three-judge appeals court panel said it was legal.

But worse, a second larger panel of judges upheld that ruling
Wednesday. The driveway wasn't private, they said, because strangers
such as "delivery people and neighborhood children" had access to it,
according to news reports.

Cultural Elitism

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a Reagan conservative, was outraged by the
decision and explained in a practical dissent that the ruling was
discriminatory because only poor people had no expectation of
privacy. Rich people, he said, have gates and fences.

His common-sense dissent explains part of what is wrong with America
in so many ways.

"There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one
kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor
people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter."

The kind of cultural elitism Kozinski describes defines our
government and political and socio-economic systems. Only rich people
can afford to run for office, and once they are elected, they have no
idea how to help poor people. They have no idea how poor people live.

That is how the mortgage crisis happened.

That is how the banking crisis happened.

Were Congress even partly populated by people who make $9 an hour,
how many would have allowed what was allowed by a bunch of rich guys,
a few well-to-do gals and a bunch of reps who didn't take economics
in college?

An American Complaint

The California case was not about a suspected drug dealer and his
trailer. It is about whether any American can keep government agents
from swarming the driveway because it is private property, as it has
long been considered to be.

Kashmir Hill wrote on abovethelaw.com that "a user's manual that's
200-plus years old can be difficult to apply to modern technologies."

That was a brilliant way to explain the difficulty in applying early
amendments to the U.S. Constitution to the way we live now. It is why
the Second Amendment is so abused and why most people don't know what
the Fourth Amendment is. The Fourth says that "the right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause."

It says you cannot just walk up to a poor man's driveway and slap a
tracking device on his car, unless you can convince a judge that you
have enough evidence to do so.

We are not paying attention, but we are losing our rights. It is not
a liberal complaint. It is not a Tea Party complaint. It is an
American complaint, an American crisis.

And while we, the people, sleep, the crisis deepens.