Does the 4th Amendment protect you from drug sniffing dogs?

Where are about to find out. Where do we draw the line between search and seizures and the reasonable expectation of privacy?

THIS Halloween, the United States Supreme Court will devote its day to dogs. The court will hear two cases from Florida to test whether “police dog sniffs” violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These two cases have not yet grabbed many headlines, but the court’s decisions could shape our rights to privacy in profound and surprising ways.

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ordinarily, unless the police trespass or otherwise intrude upon a reasonable expectation of privacy, they need not have probable cause or a warrant to justify their investigative activity. For decades now, the court has struggled with what it means for a person to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — especially when the police investigate with sense-enhancing means or technology.

One case asks whether drug sniffing dogs can be brought to the porch of a house to sniff what is inside of it. The author worries about what precedence that might set if it is approved:

If the court rules for the government in the home-sniff case, it is hard to see why the police could not station drug-sniffing dogs outside the entrances to every school, supermarket and movie theater as a routine form of drug interdiction. Dog sniffs would never involve a privacy intrusion and therefore would not trigger the requirement that the police obtain a warrant or have individual suspicion.

Moreover, today’s dogs will give way to tomorrow’s high-tech contraband-scanning devices that, under the reasoning pressed in the dog cases, would free the government to conduct routine scans of people’s homes or their bodies for all manner of contraband (or possibly for noncontraband, like marijuana grow lights, that are most commonly associated with illegality).