CHIEF JUDGE KOZINSKI, DISSENTING HERO OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT

Chief Judge Kozinski, "It seems to me that this is what makes this country truly great -- that we can have a judiciary where the person who appoints you doesn't own you."










By Adam Cohen for Time:

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.
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.
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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."
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There is no liberal or conservative in the constitution. Here is the section this quote comes from:

There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter, Judges, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are selected from the class of people who don’t live in trailers or urban ghettos. The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that’s not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can’t afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it. Whatever else one may say about Pineda-Moreno, it’s perfectly clear that he did not expect-----and did certainly did not consent----to have strangers prowl his property in the middle of the night and attach electronic tracking devices to the underside of his car. No one does.
When you glide your BMW into your underground garage or behind an electric gate, you don’t need to worry that somebody might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But the constitution doesn’t prefer the rich over the poor; the man who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is guarded by the Bel Air Patrol. The panel’s breezy opinion is troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them it’s unselfconscious cultural elitism.

Judge Kozinski’s dissenting opinion is a thing of beauty and I would encourage everyone to please read the whole thing. I have included my favorite parts which I read with glee and hope I did not wake my neighbor yelling YES several times. Chief Judge Kozinski was born in Romania, his parents were both survivors of the Holocaust. His nicknames are the Big Kozinski and the Wizard of Koz.


…our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home’s curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.

The facts are disturbingly simple: Police snuck onto Pineda-Moreno’s property in the dead of night and attached A GPS tracking device to the underside of his car. The device continuously recorded the car’s location, allowing police to monitor all of Pineda-Moreno’s movements without the need for visual surveillance. The panel holds that none of this implicates the Fourth Amendment, even though the government concedes that the car was in the curtilage of Pineda-Moreno’s home at the time the police attached the tracking device. The panel twice errs in very significant and dangerous ways.
1. The opinion assumes that Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was part of his home’s curtilage, yet concludes that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Curtilage is a quaint word most people are not familiar with; even among judges and lawyer, the word is seldom well understood. Yet, it stands for a very important concept because it rounds out the constitutional protections accorded an individual when he is at home.

Curtilage comes to us by way of Middle English and traces it’s roots to the Old French courtillage, roughly meaning court or little yard. In modern times it has come to mean those portions of a homeowner’s property so closely associated with the home as to be considered part of it. The walkway leading from the street to the house is probably part of the curtilage, and the stairs from the walkway to the porch almost certainly are, as is the porch where grandma sits and rocks most afternoons and watches strangers pass by. The attached garage on the side of the house is part of the curtilage, and so is the detached shed where dad keeps his shop equipment and mom her gardening tools-----so long as it’s not too far from the house itself. The front lawn is part of the curtilage, and the driveway and the backyard-----if it’s not too big, and is properly separated from the open fields beyond the house.
Whether some portion of property-----the porch, the stairs, the shed, the yard, the chicken coop----is part of the curtilage is sometimes a disputed question. But once it is determined that something is part of the curtilage, it’s entitled to precisely the same Fourth Amendment protections as the home itself. How do we know? Because the Supreme Court has said so repeatedly.

OK, everyone repeat after me.  Unless you have a warrant get the hell off of my curtilage.

By tracking and recording the movements of millions of individuals the government can use computers to detect patterns and develop suspicions. It can also learn a great deal about us because where we go says much about who we are. Are Winston and Julia’s cell phones together near a hotel a bit too often? Was Syme’s OnStar near an STD clinic? Were Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at that protest outside the White House? The FBI need no longer deploy agents to infiltrate groups it considers subversive; it can figure out where the groups hold meetings and ask the phone company for a list of cell phones near those locations.
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I don’t think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle’s every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of de`ja` vu. This case, if any deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.

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And then there is Judge Reinhardt:
REINHARDT, Circuit Judge, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:
I concur in Chief Judge Kozinski’s dissent.
I have served on this court for nearly three decades. I regret that over that time the courts have gradually but deliberately reduced the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the point at which it scarcely resembles the robust guarantor of our constitutional rights we knew when I joined the bench....
These decisions have curtailed the “right of the people to be secure…against unreasonable searches and seizures” not only in our homes and surrounding curtilage, but also in our vehicles, computers, telephones, and bodies-----all the way down to our bodily fluids and DNA.
Today’s decision is but one more step down the gloomy path the current Judiciary has chosen to follow with regard to the liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, I predict that there will be many more such decisions to come.
I dissent.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Doublethink
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08-30385.pdf
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2004/feature_bazelon_janfeb04.msp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Kozinski