American Civil Liberties Union

Recently I wrote about an ACLU of Michigan report that highlighted the problem of police cameras being installed outside of people’s private homes. Last week I learned from my colleague Doug Bonney of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri about an even more egregious incident involving video surveillance of a private home in Missouri. Bonney described the situation to me:

In September I wrote about how policymakers often act on privacy issues only when they themselves feel their privacy personally threatened—for example when Robert Bork’s video rental records were obtained by a reporter. Now Peter Maass, writing in the New Yorker and ProPublica, is raising a key question about the Petraeus scandal: will lawmakers sit up and take notice of how easily the CIA Director’s private emails were discovered? Will they “start worrying a bit more about becoming the next Petraeus or Bork”? It may well be true that the discovery of an affair by an FBI agent would not have led to anything had the subject been an ordinary person, but because Petraeus was in such an important role, the finding kept getting passed around because nobody dared to take the responsibility of doing nothing about it. And inevitably, it eventually leaked. As Maass astutely observes, “the Petraeus case shows that among the people who have the most to lose from unchecked surveillance are the people who thought they would benefit from it—government elites.”

Yesterday we asked the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to consider our argument that law enforcement agents should have to obtain a warrant based on probable cause to attach a GPS tracker to a car and track its movements (you can read our amicus brief here).

In the case, the government suspected that Harry, Mark and Michael Katzin had robbed a number of Rite-Aid pharmacies. To confirm their hunch they attached a GPS tracker—without first going to a judge and getting a warrant—to Harry Katzin’s car. They used the GPS tracker to follow the Katzins when they traveled to another Rite-Aid, and arrested them shortly afterwards.

When the CIA director cannot hide his activities online, what hope is there for the rest of us? In the unfolding sex scandal that has led to the resignation of David Petraeus, the FBI’s electronic surveillance and tracking of Petraeus and his mistress Paula Broadwell is more than a side show—it's a key component of the story. More importantly, there are enough interesting tidbits (some of which change by the hour, as new details are leaked), to make this story an excellent lesson on the government’s surveillance powers—as well as a reminder of the need to reform those powers.