to Pet. But in United States v. Place, 462 U. S. 696, 707 (1983), we held that a dog sniff that "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics" does "not constitute a `search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment," and it must follow that sense-enhancing equipment that identifies nothing but illegal activity is not a search either. All rights reserved. Because Kyllo satisfied the two prongs required to entitle him to a Franks hearing, the district court erred in refusing to consider his claim that the affiant recklessly omitted material information about his marital relationship.

App. To begin with, there is no necessary connection between the sophistication of the surveillance equipment and the “intimacy” of the details that it observes–which means that one cannot say (and the police cannot be assured) that use of the relatively crude equipment at issue here will always be lawful. The thermogram indicates the suspect house as it appeared with the Gain and contrast in its default setting. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press. See Minnesota v. Carter, 525 U.S. 83, 104 (1998) (Breyer, J., concurring in judgment). Pp. While the Court "take[s] the long view" and decides this case based largely on the potential of yet-to-be-developed technology that might allow "through-the-wall surveillance," ante, at 11-12; see ante, at 8, n. 3, this case involves nothing more than off-the-wall surveillance by law enforcement officers to gather information exposed to the general public from the outside of petitioner's home. Argued and Submitted May 5, 1994.Memorandum Filed June 14, 1994.Memorandum Withdrawn Sept. 29, 1994.Decided Oct. 4, 1994.

The newly minted rule encompasses "obtaining [1] by sense-enhancing technology [2] any information regarding the interior of the home [3] that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion into a constitutionally protected area ... [4] at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use." 39-40. Before trial, Kyllo filed a motion to suppress all the evidence obtained in a search of his residence. 39—40. But see Rakas, supra, at 143-144, n. 12. We review de novo. For the first time in its history, the Court assumes that an inference can amount to a Fourth Amendment violation. 3-5. Kyllo requested that this issue be considered in the district court's Franks hearing, but the court refused. We have previously reserved judgment as to how much technological enhancement of ordinary perception from such a vantage point, if any, is too much. UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee,v.Danny Lee KYLLO, Defendant-Appellant. After an evidentiary hearing, the District Court found: "[T]he use of the thermal imaging device here was not an intrusion into Kyllo's home. Thus, the notion that heat emissions from the outside of a dwelling is a private matter implicating the protections of the Fourth Amendment (the text of which guarantees the right of people "to be secure in their ... houses" against unreasonable searches and seizures (emphasis added)) is not only unprecedented but also quite difficult to take seriously. For example, as the cases discussed above make clear, the technology enabling human flight has exposed to public view (and hence, we have said, to official observation) uncovered portions of the house and its curtilage that once were private. As we observed in California v. Ciraolo, 476 U. S. 207, 213 (1986), "[t]he Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares.".

173, 188; Carter, supra, at 97 (Scalia, J., concurring). The Court has crafted a rule that purports to deal with direct observations of the inside of the home, but the case before us merely involves indirect deductions from "off-the-wall" surveillance, that is, observations of the exterior of the home. The present case involves officers on a public street engaged in more than naked-eye surveillance of a home.

We have since decoupled violation of a person’s Fourth Amendment rights from trespassory violation of his property, see Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 143 (1978), but the lawfulness of warrantless visual surveillance of a home has still been preserved. The two reasons advanced by the Court as justifications for the adoption of its new rule are both unpersuasive. Cf.

Ciraolo, supra, at 211. Under that expansive view, I suppose, an officer using an infrared camera to observe a man silently entering the side door of a house at night carrying a pizza might conclude that its interior is now occupied by someone who likes pizza, and by doing so the officer would be guilty of conducting an unconstitutional "search" of the home. Limiting the prohibition of thermal imaging to "intimate details" would not only be wrong in principle; it would be impractical in application, failing to provide "a workable accommodation between the needs of law enforcement and the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment," Oliver v. United States, 466 U. S. 170, 181 (1984).

We rejected such a mechanical interpretation of the Fourth Amendment in Katz, where the eavesdropping device picked up only sound waves that reached the exterior of the phone booth. A thermal imager reveals the relative heat of various rooms in the home. Held: Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment "search," and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. The imaging was to be used to determine if the amount of heat emanating from the home was consistent with the high-intensity lamps typically used for indoor marijuana growth. 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. The present case involves officers on a public street engaged in more than naked-eye surveillance of a home. For that reason, in determining the prejudicial effect of the omission in the search warrant of relevant facts concerning Luanne Kyllo, we will disregard the allegation in the affidavit concerning the heat emitted from Kyllo's residence. Nevertheless, the use of such a device would be unconstitutional under the Court's rule, as would the use of other new devices that might detect the odor of deadly bacteria or chemicals for making a new type of high explosive, even if the devices (like the dog sniffs) are "so limited in both the manner in which" they obtain information and "in the content of the information" they reveal. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit remanded the case for an evidentiary hearing regarding the intrusiveness of thermal imaging.

Our opinion in United States v. Chesher, 678 F.2d 1353 (9th Cir.1982), is instructive. Those observations were made with a fairly primitive thermal imager that gathered data exposed on the outside of petitioner's home but did not invade any constitutionally protected interest in privacy.1 Moreover, I believe that the supposedly "bright-line" rule the Court has created in response to its concerns about future technological developments is unnecessary, unwise, and inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed; the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. The district court denied his motion. It is undisputed that two guns were present in the same residence as the grow operation. The affiant's explanation was that he did not know how to read the rap sheet correctly. First, Kyllo has made the required substantial preliminary showing. See 190 F. 3d 1041 (CA9 1999); United States v. Robinson, 62 F. 3d 1325 (CA11 1995) (upholding warrantless use of thermal imager); United States v. Myers, 46 F. 3d 668 (CA7 1995) (same); United States v. Ishmael, 48 F. 3d 850 (CA5 1995) (same); United States v. Pinson, 24 F. 3d 1056 (CA8 1994) (same).

Yet how much use is general public use is not even hinted at by the Court's opinion, which makes the somewhat doubtful assumption that the thermal imager used in this case does not satisfy that criterion.5 In any event, putting aside its lack of clarity, this criterion is somewhat perverse because it seems likely that the threat to privacy will grow, rather than recede, as the use of intrusive equipment becomes more readily available. Rep. 807 (K. B. Kyllo filed a motion to suppress evidence on two theories. We rejected such a mechanical interpretation of the Fourth Amendment in Katz, where the eavesdropping device picked up only sound waves that reached the exterior of the phone booth. Finally, he erroneously claimed that Kyllo was using too much electricity on the incorrect assumption that power consumption would decrease linearly with the square footage of the residence, Det. The final requirement of the Court's new rule, that the information "could not otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," ante, at 6 (internal quotation marks omitted), also extends too far as the Court applies it. After Kyllo was indicted on a federal drug charge, he unsuccessfully moved to suppress the evidence seized from his home and then entered a conditional guilty plea. Five justices, including Justices Scalia and Thomas, in this 5-4 opinion, give us the Court's most bewildering decision in recent years. United States v. Dozier, 844 F.2d 701, 705 (9th Cir.

A comparison between the facts of this case and the facts of Dozier shows that the district court's finding in this case is not clearly erroneous. 93-30231.

The affiant also alleged that cars on the suspect's property belonged to certain persons although the affiant had earlier performed a DMV search that showed that the cars did not belong to those persons. Cf. To be entitled to a Franks hearing on this issue, Kyllo must first make a substantial preliminary showing that the affidavit contained a misleading omission and that the omission resulted from a deliberate or reckless disregard of the truth. The dissent’s proposed standard–whether the technology offers the “functional equivalent of actual presence in the area being searched,” post, at 7–would seem quite similar to our own at first blush. That has no bearing, however, upon whether hi-tech measurement of emanations from a house is a search.