Police use radar to look inside homes without warrants
Recent new reports indicate that at least 50 police agencies, including the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, have begun using radars that can peer into citizens houses, without seeking warrants before doing so. According to a report by USA Today, the U.S. Marshals have spent more than $180,000 on the devices, since 2012, and the U.S. Marshals and FBI began using the devices more than two years ago, “with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used.”
Originally developed for military applications in Iraq and Afghanistan, the device, called the Range-R, operates like a motion detector, using radio waves to determine whether a house or building is occupied, how far away the occupant(s) is and whether the occupant(s) is moving. Reports indicate the device can detect movement as subtle as human breathing up to 50 feet away. While the device reportedly only indicates that it has detected movement on the other side of a wall and how far away the movement was — reports indicate that it does not display a picture of what is happening inside a home — other radar devices on the market have more advanced capabilities. Some can produce a three-dimensional display of where people are inside a home, while another device is capable of mapping the interior of homes and locating people within them.
Police officers’ use of the device without a warrant raises important constitutional questions. In 2001, the United States Supreme Court held that officers could not lawfully use a thermal camera to look inside a home for heat signatures without first obtaining a warrant. See, Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001). The inside of a person’s home has historically been one of the places most intimately protected from government intrusion, and the law significantly limits government officials’ ability to search inside a home without a warrant. While the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld an arrest where the device was used, the court carefully noted that it “had little doubt that the radar device … will soon generate many questions for [the] court.” It will certainly be interesting to see how the law develops to deal with police agencies’ use of this and other devices, such as the Stingray, that allow government officials to surreptitiously monitor citizens’ activity.