Google Earth Used To Find Unlicensed Pools

[Pat McCotter]

Google Earth Used To Find Unlicensed Pools

Updated: Monday, 02 Aug 2010, 10:14 AM EDT

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. - A town on New York's Long Island is using Google Earth to find backyard pools that don't have the proper permits.

The town of Riverhead has used the satellite image service to find about 250 pools whose owners never filled out the required paperwork.

Violators were told to get the permits or face hefty fines. So far about $75,000 in fees has been collected.

Riverhead's chief building inspector Leroy Barnes Jr. said the unpermitted pools were a safety concern. He said that without the required inspections there was no way to know whether the pools' plumbing, electrical work and fencing met state and local regulations.

"Pool safety has always been my concern," Barnes said.

But some privacy advocates say the use of Google Earth to find scofflaw swimming pools reeks of Big Brother.

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments.

"The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms," she said.

A representative for Google said she did not know of any other community using Google Earth as it has been used in Riverhead. She did not respond to a question about whether Google has any concerns about how the town is using the service.

[Lloyd Danforth]

At first I thought: Camouflage that looks like a garden from above, then I thought about having to have more than one due to season change.  Perhaps camouflage that looks like evergreens or an evergreen maze from above.

[Lex]

Indoor pool?

[littlehawk]

I wish a class action suit would be filed aginist earthgoogle for privacy invasion.

[Lloyd Danforth]

Indoor pool?

Oh! Oh! Camouflage Greenhouse!

[Kat Kanning]

I wish a class action suit would be filed aginist earthgoogle for privacy invasion.

So why don't you do it?

[Jim Johnson]

Las Vegas has been buying spy satellite pictures from old eastern block countries since at least 2004 along with analysis of changes from year to year.
The city administration was very blatant about using them to find code violations.

[Kat Kanning]

CA has been doing it for a long time, too.  People in my town figured out the fines were cheaper than the building permits.

[KBCraig]

Indoor pool?

That's not a pool, that's Pat K's bathtub!

[Pat K]

Shuud up.. your giving away my secret location.

[Pat McCotter]

 

[Pat McCotter]

Big Brother Is Searching You
August 23, 2010 4:10 PM

While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate 4th-Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

Here's what the 4th Amendment says: "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, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The spirit of and the letter of this amendment is that government agencies are not allowed to go on hunting expeditions looking for violations or transgressions. If government officials want to search your property, they have to demonstrate good reason why they suspect you of committing a crime.

Let's say a small town wanted to crack down on swimming pool permit violations. If local police went house to house, telling people they were going to look for swimming pools in everybody's backyards, nobody would accept this because it would clearly violate the 4th Amendment. However, if you do exactly the same thing using cameras in space, it's somehow OK.

The town of Riverhead on Long Island used Google Earth to search all back yards in the town for swimming pool transgressions.

They found about 250 pools built without permits and collected about $75,000 in fines. Critics say they did it for the money, but city officials said they're concerned mainly about safety.

There's no such ambiguity in Greece. Greek officials are spotting undeclared swimming pools -- and they're definitely doing it for the money. Faced with a budget crunch, Greece's government is using Google Earth to hunt for swimming pools, giving them a justification for collecting extra taxes.

The idea is: Hey, we need more money. Let's go find some.

The Greece example is similar in that respect to the use of Google Earth in the U.K. by fish thieves. In at least 12 documented cases, exotic-fish thieves used Google Earth to find backyard ponds. The crooks broke into the yards and stole expensive live fish that they intended to sell for big bucks.

The purpose of the 4th Amendment is to prevent the U.S. government from doing what Greece's government is doing, which is essentially what U.K. fish thieves are doing: Using arbitrary searches to hunt for opportunities to take something away from people.

Here's the problem. If one town sets a precedent that's it's OK to violate 4th Amendment protections as long as you use satellite imagery, then any government can do the same for any reason. And the technologies and methods for doing so are becoming very sophisticated.

A company called Remote Sensing Metrics is buying satellite pictures from privately owned satellite photography companies including DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, counting cars in Wal-Mart parking lots, then selling analysis of the data to hedge funds and other analysts. They're selling it as a discreet package billed as "satellite parking lot fill rate analysis."

Other firms are monitoring crops to better predict commodity pricing for wheat, corn and so on.

The NYPD already uses satellite imagery for crime fighting. They track crimes, look for clusters where many crimes are occurring together, then flood those locations with police officers.

Taking it to the next level

Those all sound like legitimate and creative uses for new technology. But where is it all going?

Once you combine all-seeing satellite imagery with sophisticated computerized number-crunching, you end up with massive potential for abuse -- especially by government agencies.

One might imagine a dystopian future where automated systems constantly scan every house in the country for all kinds of violations, from heat escaping the house to backyard barbecues to the counting of people coming and going from every house.

It's the ol' slippery slope argument, but it must be taken seriously. If it's OK for a town government to peek into every backyard in Riverhead to find a handful of pool-permit violators, why would it not be acceptable for other agencies to look at all homes and businesses in the nation for a much wider variety of potential violations.

And if it's OK to do that using satellite imagery, what about using other technologies?

A company called American Science and Engineering sells a high-end, tricked out security vehicle called the Z Backscatter Van. Its sole purpose, if used by government agencies, is to violate the 4th Amendment.

The van sits there by the side of the road and X-rays cars passing by. It's like a full-body scan at the airport, but for cars. The manufacturer brags about the fact that the van keeps a "low profile." The Web site says: "The system is unobtrusive, as it maintains the outward appearance of an ordinary van."

What the van does is unreasonable searches without probable cause and without the knowledge of the person who owns the property being searched. That's its only function.

Private companies and your privacy

American Science and Engineering would no doubt argue that they're selling it to private companies, which raises yet another question. Is it acceptable for private companies to do what would be a 4th Amendment violation if it were done by a government agency?

Private security companies can't search your home without a warrant, and they can't pull you over and search your car. So why can they search your car with an X-ray scanner?

Within a few years, we'll have technology that can see through walls and on a large scale. We'll be able to feed the data into supercomputers and get results on trends and other analysis.

We need to figure out what's OK and what isn't. The first step is to apply the 4th Amendment to searches conducted without probable cause via Google Earth.

Riverhead officials should be forced to give back all fees collected for unpermitted swimming pools, for example, and banned from future hunting expeditions.

Technology should not be used to exempt government agencies from the Constitution. Quite the opposite. Technology empowers governments to violate our rights with ruthless efficiency.

I wonder if satellites can detect America's Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves?

[Tom Sawyer]

Two types of outside space have different constitutional protections...

Curtilage...
Outside space you can have an expectation of privacy in... ie. your fenced in backyard... other spaces immediately around your dwelling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtilage

Then they came up with the open fields doctrine ie.

Courts have continuously held that entry into an open field—whether trespass or not—is not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_fields_doctrine

[KBCraig]

This worries me a lot more than Google's satellites.

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-body-scan-technology-deployed-in-street-roving-vans/

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E's machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

"This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever," says Reiss.

[Sunshine]

Two types of outside space have different constitutional protections...

Curtilage...
Outside space you can have an expectation of privacy in... ie. your fenced in backyard... other spaces immediately around your dwelling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtilage

Have you read this article regarding curtilage?  http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000


The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
Time.com

By ADAM COHEN Adam Cohen – Thu Aug 26, 3:45 am ET

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.)

It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "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 judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (Comment on this story.)

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.