When the government hides spy cameras on your land, fight back in court (opens in new tab)

Game wardens have shockingly broad authority. It goes back to the English common law. You don’t actually own land you just hold it fee simple and the Crown, or the State in America, actually has the right to all game. They can even enter your house without a warrant to, for example, check freezers. And if they find anything you’d have best tagged it properly.

However all the game wardens I know aren’t looking to just randomly harass people. There is usually a good reason when they go after someone, like shooting from a motor vehicle on the road.

> Game is a public resource and we're sufficiently populated these days, and weapons sufficiently advanced, that unchecked hunting can decimate wildlife populations.

Sure, but that was true thousands of years ago too. It doesn't take much.

If you're willing to draw the obvious conclusion from the fact that mass extinction of large animals has occurred every time humans were introduced somewhere, it's always been true.

> What bothers me more is that a massive portion of the US population falls under the zone wherein Customs and Border Protection can do almost whatever they want. It's something like 100 miles from the border.

I definitely agree that this 100-mile reach is egregious overreach, but have there ever been any cases of this being actually abused, such as in the scenario you describe? Or for instance, have CBP agents ever busted into someone's home?

The difference is that judges, justices, and lawmakers are a part of the elite class, and will never be threatened by such abuses.

>The game warden probably doesn't give a shit about your weed (unless you were high/drunk while carrying/using a firearm); he cares about whether you shot a deer when you weren't supposed to

No organization gives up or manages out its best and brightest. I trust your average beat cop not to be a power tripping jerk a lot more than I trust the average game warden.

This goes for all the "second rate" law enforcement agencies, DEA, ATF, Port Authority, blue helmets. Some of those guys truly believe in the mission (and I sympathize with these guys, caring about the mission in an organization where 1/10th to 1/2 of people have "settled" for the job is terrible). Some of those guys are just clock punchers. But a disturbing number of those guys quit or got managed out of the state police, FBI or whatever for shoot/taze/beat first ask questions later behavior that tends to result in dismissed charges which tend to result in poor performance reviews.

If I remember correctly, being within 100 miles of an international airport counts too.

Yup, a lot of people don't know about this, but it is pretty bad. Within 25 miles of any US border or coastline, they can actually come into your house without a warrant to look for evidence of smuggling people, contraband, items not taxed properly and basically everything under their regulatory authority. 25-100 miles and they're not allowed to go in your house without a warrant, but they can stop you outside, hassle you, search your car and your person without one.

Something like 90% of the US population lives within the 100 mile zone, and the entire state of Florida resides within it because it is less than 200 miles across.

Surely we can just resolve this by looking at the actual complaint instead of trying to divine sense from some words like it's a party manifesto from Xi? Here it is, then:

https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Tennessee-Open-Fie...

The graphic on page 11 seems to indeed show the camera on the property.

> “placed the within the boundaries of where he lives, farms and hunts.”

I recognize the words, but that is a really strained sentence structure. What are they trying to say?

Placed within the boundaries sounds like my property. If I'm roaming my property and find something there that I did not put there, then I'm going to be taking it down. I'll probably even attempt to sell it.

Even if something is placed on government-owned land (eg. a river), they're still bound by the fourth amendment and they can't use security cameras that surveil where the owner/person has a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'.

Whether or not that means the owner of the land has such expectation on hundreds of acres depends on how secure the location is; you could make the argument "anyone could legally boat down the river and see them, therefore there is not an expectation of privacy", or you could make the argument that cameras installed at an unreasonably high elevation (eg. the top of a tree on the river) would be surveilling land that nobody not trespassing could see. This is also assuming you have a legal fence/barrier that informs anyone trespassing isn't allowed, otherwise it'd be harder to claim treading the land and setting up 'wildlife cameras' is trespassing.

I had the opposite takeaway from the text; that is, that the cameras were, in fact, on his property.

The quote you cited is just referencing his property, I think they said 163 acres.

They're his lawyers, not journalists.

It will also likely soon become moot as drones get cheaper and cheaper, and you don't own the sky over your land. Here's a company, Brinc, building border security drones which the promo video also says can also easily be used for prisons, data centers and just about anything else.

https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/brinc-startup-taser-dron...

This instance seems like a 'taking'. The government should have to pay rent if the installation is more than transient (something like 24 hours), and they should not be able to keep it secret from, or disrupt the owner's use of the land without invoking eminent domain.

You are making a rather basic, fundamental, and common mistake due to modern eroded understanding of language and meanings. The effects that the fourth amendment prohibits the government from violating, do in fact include land property.

I'm sure the common person likes the Freedom to Roam, but those of us who live on farms and like our seclusion it would be a nightmare.

The courts have typically been ruling that other kinds of tech designed to surveil without entering the property (e.g., thermal imaging) constitute searches. I could see drones being counted differently, but that doesn't seem like a certain bet to me.

Not necessarily, judges have confirmed that using high tech surveillance from the street isn’t always legal (e.g. massive checks of the temperature in people’s garage to find people growing plants etc.).

I thought the OP article was likely a rehash of an older article so googled his name.

The Forbes article and the PPP loan results were right next to each other. I read them both and thought the guy was pretty sketchy all in all.

As for stirring up controversy, this entire topic is controversial. It’s a post designed to trigger privacy rights people, and doing quite well by the looks of it.

And if a pleb logged a few feet over the property line and that was a government tree you could bet they'd be going after him for some insane fantasy value of it.