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SAN FRANCISCO — Police investigating as many as 30 firebombings of utility poles focused on a man with an apparent grudge against Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and searched his home without a warrant. 

They said they discovered a detonation cord similar to one used on a telephone pole, books on how to make and detonate bombs and large glass bottles containing unknown chemicals. 

The search was challenged by Mark Knights, who had agreed to waive his constitutional privacy rights as a condition of his early release from jail on a public intoxication conviction. 

The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments Tuesday in the case, which could determine whether the nation’s 4.4 million convicts on probation or parole can be forced to waive privacy rights when released early from jail or prison. 

California’s law, the nation’s strictest, demands that people on parole or probation waive their Fourth Amendment federal rights to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. Probation or parole generally lasts up to five years. 

Knights was suspected along with another man of conspiring to blow up the utility equipment in revenge for his electricity being turned off. 

A ruling upholding the 1998 search likely would usher in a wave of new state laws allowing warrantless searches of millions of convicts released early from jail or prison. 

“I would think the states would move in that direction,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. 

A ruling invalidating the search would leave intact a nationwide hodgepodge of laws, none of which demand a complete waiver of privacy as does California. It would also mean that authorities could not use at trial what they found in Knights’ apartment in Napa, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. 

The case has attracted widespread interest from civil rights and get-tough-on-crime groups. 

The government, following customary practice, declined comment on the pending case. 

Knights’ attorney, Hilary Fox, said the case has wide-ranging implications for the public at large, not just those who have been freed early from their jail cells. 

That is because the government will ask the high court to uphold the search on grounds that an early release is a privilege, and that those not wishing to waive their privacy rights can remain incarcerated. 

If the high court agrees, lawmakers may begin conditioning other benefits on a waiver of constitutional rights, Fox said. 

“If you want to have a driver’s license, in exchange, will you agree to submit to searches in your car at any time?” Fox asked. “What about welfare benefits, government employment?” 

Warrantless searches at the homes of those on early release also infringe on the rights of people living with them, she said. 

Some community groups said that many felons on early release are violent criminals that need to be monitored by the police, and people living with them do so at their own risk. 

The Center for the Community Interest, an anti-crime group billing itself as the “common sense counter to the ACLU,” urged the court to uphold Knights’ search while limiting the loss of Fourth Amendment rights only to people released early from incarceration. 

“We don’t want the court to put a blank check out there for waivers to be placed on everybody, like for those wanting government services,” said Lyle Roberts, the center’s attorney. “We want this just in regard to supervising those released early.” 

The high court already has allowed warrantless searches in airports and a wide variety of other public places and situations. Certain transportation and safety workers are required to submit to drug tests. Public school authorities may search students’ lockers. 

The court also has ruled in the post-incarceration context before, deciding in a Wisconsin case that probation authorities could search someone released early from jail without a warrant. 

But that 1987 decision was based on the so-called “special needs” of probation departments to ensure that the probationer is abiding by the terms of his release and not, for example, using drugs or alcohol.  

The decision did not authorize police to search that same home without a warrant as a pretext to investigate criminal behavior. 

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco invalidated the search at Knights’ apartment last year. The court said the police needed a warrant, and that they illegally used Knights’ probation status as a “mere subterfuge” to search his home for criminal activity not associated with his probation terms. 

The case is United States v. Knights, 001260.