'The fact that the dog is "just sniffing the air" is not the issue - the dog is sniffing the air to find out what I have inside a closed container in a trunk'

Mark - This statement is incorrect. The dog is not being used to "find out what I have inside a closed container in a trunk" as you stated.

Please reread the ruling, especially: "United States v. Place, 462 U. S. 696 (1983), we treated a canine sniff by a well-trained narcotics-detection dog as "sui generis" because it "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item." Id., at 707; see also Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U. S. 32, 40 (2000)"

The dog ONLY (absent erroneous behavior by the handler) alerts to the presence of narcotics, not child pornography, not untaxed cigarettes, not explosives, or ANY OTHER LEGAL OR ILLEGAL SUBSTANCE. A scan that does not result in an alert does not intrude on the privacy of the individual at all. Neither the dog, nor the government, have any idea what is in the closed container in the trunk, except they can conclude that there is no odor of a narcotic that the dog is trained to detect being emitted from the vehicle. Simple, they don't have drugs. That neither constitutes, as the Court ruled, a search or an undue detention.

Sorry, but your comparison to packet sniffers is way out in left field. A packet sniffer, such as Carnivore, evaluates every bit of every packet that traverses it's boundary. It then makes a decision, based on what it now knows, whether the packet meets certain criteria or not. If it doesn't meet the criteria, it is supposed to ignore it, BUT it has already conducted the search. This is analogous to ripping everything out of the trunk of the car and looking at it before the dog sniffed it - which I think the Court would rule against.

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