My view is that a reasonable 4th ‘plain view’ standpoint should ride on the ‘plain’ part of the statement. That is, when I, for a reasonable amount of money, can launch my own satellites to look wherever I want, then great, the cops can, too. I see this as analogous to freedom of speech – I can print/blog/email/whatever at my own cost, and while The Powers That Be can disagree, at their (erm, my) expense, they can’t stop me, modulo certain extreme circumstances.

There are problems with unregulated space automata, of course, much like there would be with unregulated air flight. Ideally, let the market sort it out. Less ideally, regulate it top-down. But pretend that looking in my window from space is not a violation of search while denying the same right to me? That’s not legal reasoning. That’s a rubber stamp in a robe.

Where along the gradient proposed does the quality of freedom suffer overmuch? I would say prior to the line we’ve already drawn, personally. I’m not a fan of the ruling on aerial search as non-search.

Assuming that image resolution, data capacity, and software ability increase each year, sooner or later 24/7 tracking will be reality.

The question is: Then What?

They don’t create a “perpetual record” as much as they do periodic photographs with huge gaps of time in them; the ‘lites are not geostationary (which would be impossible at our latitudes) or even geosynchronous.

They create fairly low-rez images that are black-and-white, and thus hard to interpret. I believe the implication was that it would be very difficult to identify someone from a spy photo.

Also, getting a photo of a specific spot takes time and effort to set up. One would have to find the right satellite, wait for its orbit to swing around, and then grab the photo as it passes. Luckily, they see through cloud cover, or they’d be next to useless.

That’s not to say that the sort of satellite cover you’re imagining is not a potential future technology that we should consider the implications of, but just as new tech makes old rulings mean different things, the limitations of current tech have a bearing on the extent of any violations that this ruling creates.

Of course, I’m assuming that Pike is being truthful. He’s obviously got some incentive to play down the capabilities of these satellites in the current clime.