Would you mind elaborating? I don’t know what you mean by ‘excuse’ in either example. You don’t need an excuse as a photographer to capture people sunbathing in their gardens, if you’re standing on public land. And law enforcement doesn’t currently need an excuse for tracking location. In both cases, the real issue is that there is currently (as far as the law is concerned) no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when you’re outside and visible to others.
when when in alaska, and the distance is such that technical or mechanical means are required to observe nude sunbathers, there is no public visibility, the offense is with the fault of the eavesdropper, and it is voyeurism.
Totally, there is a line you can cross, and it might require a telescope or mirrors. There absolutely is an expectation of privacy on private property when there is no public visibility. I wasn’t talking about telescopes or mirrors X-rays or any other tricks, just what you can observe with the naked eye. There probably is a gray area here with zoom lenses that would have to be decided in court, it might come down to intent and not who’s fault it is.
I guess that discussion is veering away from the practical question of whether anyone should be able to know who you are if you’re driving on public roads. It doesn’t require any special technical or mechanical means to see people’s license plates and faces from the side of the road or from poles or overpasses, right? What I’m really curious about is whether there should be laws established against such surveillance because it has become too cheap and easy to monitor everyone at once all the time, or whether as a society we deem activity in public space to be public knowledge and not a matter of privacy, whether no privacy should be expected.
there are somethings that are illegal that the public, and enforcement simply ignore most of the time. there are other things that are legal but apalling to the public when they encounter them.
i think this distills to a threshold for surveillance.
there needs to be some discriminator between casual observation, and active surviellance.
there seems to be a need to revisit just what a warrant is, and why it is required. i really would like to see a warrant apply to any means of collection, as in the warrant is allowing posession of the data itself, regardless of the origin as a court appointed priviledge for the term of the investigation, -regardless of origin
