Kansas law enforcement videotaped the front of a man’s home for 68 days, 15 hours per day, and gathered evidence to convict him on 16 crimes.
The officers did not have a search warrant and used a camera on a pole across the street to photograph Bruce Hay’s home. On Tuesday, a federal judge determined that it was permissible for law enforcement to do so, possibly reducing privacy protections significantly.
“Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” stated the United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its ruling in U.S. versus Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”
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Hay, an Army veteran, was found guilty of lying about his disability status in order to receive benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, the most disturbing aspect of this case is how VA officers gathered evidence against Hay. The veteran filed an appeal, claiming that the months-long surveillance of his home violated his rights. However, the federal court determined that law officers can videotape the outside of your home, which is due in part to the widespread usage of video cameras.
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The federal court’s opinion states that video cameras have grown “ubiquitous,” lowering our expectations of privacy. Police officers now wear body cameras, telephones include cameras, and many doorbells film your porch. The court is correct in that cameras are everywhere.
Law enforcement has a long history of using sophisticated recording technologies to blur the limits of privacy. Politico highlighted how Ring forced a man to hand over a full day’s worth of camera footage in order to prosecute his neighbor of a crime. For years, law enforcement utilized the Ring camera network to acquire video footage of offenders without a search warrant.
In most cases, law officers must acquire a search warrant before conducting invasive searches on private property. In this case, VA officers obtained information that Hay was not genuinely disabled, so they went ahead and recorded his home without a warrant. The court argued that this was acceptable because anyone passing by Hay’s house could see what the camera observed.
However, most individuals who pass by your residence do not sit there for two months straight. Recording the outside of your home for months on end might provide an intimate portrait of your life. Hay contended that this allowed police enforcement to study his patterns, including when he entered and exited his residence and who came in.
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