Comment Re:this is ridiculous (Score 3, Informative) 440
I'm all for the forth amendment and all, but having a camera pointed to the outside of his house is no different than having a cop sitting outside the house in a car.
The courts are starting to recognize that using technology in ways like this is different. They've decided that placing a GPS tracker on your car is different than than following you around, and that using infrared scanning of your house is different than a visual inspection, and that searching through your smart phone when they arrest you is different than looking through your wallet.
The reason these things are looked at differently is that courts have recognized that our privacy protections, as conceived in the 18th century, still need to be enforced, and that technology makes violating privacy a lot less costly for law enforcement. That is, there were natural protections due to resource constraints - pervasive surveillance of every citizen was simply not possible. Just because a technology comes along that eliminates those resource requirements does not mean that privacy is no longer protected.