For comic book heroes, crime fighting has typically involved superhuman powers or high-tech wizardry. Spiderman could climb the outside of buildings, Batman had an advanced forensic lab in the Batcave and Superman had X-ray vision. Well, life is now imitating art. Crime fighting has become part science, part science fiction.

Advances in DNA testing and other forensics have made getting the goods on the bad guys easier. But there have been other technological advances allowing police to remotely invade houses, the latest threat to our constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. This term, the U.S. Supreme Court has a case before it that will determine whether the court is going to let technology trump privacy. In U.S. vs. Kyllo, the court will decide whether police may use a thermal imaging device to detect heat emitting from a home without first obtaining a search warrant.

In 1992, Danny Lee Kyllo was arrested and charged with cultivating marijuana in his Oregon home. Police found his growing operation after surveying his home with a device that detects radiation from objects and beings. The detector recorded an unusual amount of heat loss coming from the roof above the garage and one wall, which police correctly concluded was caused by an indoor marijuana farm.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that police did not need a search warrant to utilize the thermal imaging device because Kyllo did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the "waste heat" coming from his home. But as the dissenting judge in the case pointed out, this device can monitor activity inside rooms. It doesn't matter that what is captured is radiation that has left the house. The device is still providing police with information, a kind of picture, of what is going on inside the house, where the homeowner clearly has an expectation of privacy.

Technology may give us the ability to peer through walls, to hear conversations behind closed doors, to enhance our senses in myriad ways, so that searches can be conducted without physical invasion. Yet these are still searches, and the constraints of the Fourth Amendment should apply. That means police should be allowed to use whatever investigative tools are at their disposal, but when accessing information about what is taking place inside a home they should first get a warrant.

Over the years the Supreme Court has allowed so many exceptions to the warrant requirement that the rule has virtually been swallowed by them. These exceptions, however, should stop at our front door. By ruling that advancing technology cannot be used to circumvent the warrant requirement, the court would be following the intent of our nation's founders and reminding police that our homes are places they cannot invade without good cause.

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