An arrest warrant is NOT a search warrant, unless the weapons were in plain sight or the arrestee made some move towards them that would indicate immediate threat of harm to the officers then yes, a search warrant was needed to conduct a search, and if the marshals service wants to use these devices as a part of servicing an arrest warrant then they need to file for a concurrent search warrant.

Look, it's not like there are too many judges that are going to fail to issue a warrant for Marshalls to observe a residence before conducting a raid so this is about police following proper procedure and making sure that scope of the technology usage is limit to permitted actions under proper oversight of the courts. It's a matter of the fundamental role of the courts in reigning in the excesses of the executive.

With some dangerous exceptions like NSLs you as the accused are to be informed of any warrants used to gather information against you at the time of arraignment as a normal part of discovery. If the police were actually obtaining warrants for the widespread use of such technology you'd think that defense attorneys would be made aware of it and would be talking to the media. We already know that with the stinger cellphone interception technology that police forces used the technology in an unconstitutional manner and covered up the use of the technology and the details behind it as a mandated cloak in the NDA from the tech company behind it (the police can not sign an NDA for something the intend to use to gather evidence as that necessarily means the defense does not have access to relevant information which is clearly against due process)

According to this chart the 50 largest police departments cover some 51m people or 16% of the countries entire population. If you don't consider nearly 1 in 5 people being covered by such technology large-scale then I'm not sure what to say.

That doesn't really get around Kyllo since there were civilian thermal imaging cameras available (commonly used in energy audits) but were not in widespread use by the general public. A better analogy might be detecting the name of a WiFi access point from the street that says "drug den", since the police could use commonly available equipment that are in general use to detect the AP it would not constitute a search.

I agree: Lua is absolutely one of the best things to be teaching high school students. You can either sit entirely in the Lua language itself, or you can learn to extend the capabilities of the VM and interface with outside libraries and frameworks.

No, we already have a ruling, Kyllo vs U.S. where the court quite clearly stated the limits of extra-sensory detection equipment:

"Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a "search" and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

LOL Google don't force you to use G+.

Try to delete it. It's your phone, go ahead.