A Win For The 4th Amendment
The US Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that police needed a warrant to track a suspect with a GPS system on his car.
In 2005 police attached a GPS tracking device to a jeep driven by suspect Antoine Jones and used evidence from the device to show he was driving around distributing cocaine.
Jones appealed his conviction on the grounds that the police needed a warrant to place the device, and accordingly needed probable cause (and it seems in this case it would have been easy to show).
The main ruling was (in perhaps a shock to liberals) written by Justice Scalia who wrote
“Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred.”
Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Sotomayor agreed with Scalia while the remaining justices supported the view of Justice Alito, who limited the ruling to this specific case rather than establishing a broader rule. He also based his ruling on privacy grounds rather than 4th amendment grounds.
I tend to agree with Scalia that this was a clear 4th amendment issue but the fact we got a unanimous court on this issue is a good thing.
11 Responses to “A Win For The 4th Amendment”
This IS good news. Now what will it take for them to find the word “seizure” in there?
It seems the ability to seize anything without a warrant, including the person, is allowable at this time.
Baby steps.
Agreed with both the post, and with Prof. Privacy in the digital age is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and I think it will be to our detriment if we don’t have some major rulings to protect it. This is a good one.
I agree with the ruling but I don’t think it’s as clear as it first appears. As I understand it, the majority went further than just saying that the act of attaching the device constituted a violation of the 4th amendment, they went on to conclude that any high-tech means of tracking an individual, even if it didn’t involve the intrusion into a protected space, would also be a violation.
I assume we would not consider it unreasonable for a police officer to discretely follow a suspect in public spaces. So what’s the real difference if they use high-tech means rather than physical means of tracking? Are we OK with the government knowing where we are, as long as they can’t do it too easily or too discretely? If so, where do we draw that line?
Interesting how “the Right to Privacy” is so easily defined and supported by all the judges, even when privacy is defined when one is not in a private place.
Wonder how “the Right to Bear Arms” will make out when the next case comes before the court.
Bet it won’t be unanimous like this one was.
I would think that a vehicle is private property. LEO can watch it in public, but the attaching of a GPS without a warrant is invasion of privacy. Like searching through garbage on the street versus going into a home and searching the same garbage. The SCOTUS gave one for the civil liberties, left right and libertarian…
rudi, yes all nine judges agreed to that and I agree with them. But, five of the judges said it would be a violation even if they didn’t need to attach anything to the vehicle. That’s what makes me wonder.
Why didn’t they just accuse him of terrorism and arrest him indefinitely without trial in violation of the 6th amendment? Why isn’t that case in front of the Supreme Court.
“yes all nine judges agreed to that and I agree with them. But, five of the judges said it would be a violation even if they didn’t need to attach anything to the vehicle. That’s what makes me wonder.”
I can think of a number of scenarios where such a clarification might be necessary. If the car has a built-in GPS, or if the car has OnStar (much the same thing), or if the user had a cell phone with a tracking function, the police could theoretically get access to whomever owns that signal (OnStar, Apples, etc), and they’d be doing basically the same thing as in this case, but without attaching anything to the car physically. This says they’d need a warrant. One can also see similarities with the case (can’t remember what it’s called) where the police used infrared cameras to see that one section of a suspect’s home was very hot. They used this to get a warrant to search the home, where they found a grow room for marijuana. It was ruled unconstitutional to use the infrared sensors, which effectively looked into the house without probable cause.
roro,
I agree with those cases, but my question about where the line is drawn still stands. In one of those cases, they are tapping proprietary data streams. In the other case, they are effectively looking into private property without entering. In both of those cases I can see a clear argument for restricting that sort of activity as a violation of the 4th amendment.
The hypothetical case I have in mind is this: suppose a city decided to install a network of surveillance cameras, pointed only at public spaces. They then couple that with imaging technology that, given a set of pictures of a person or a car, could tell you where that person or car was last seen in public, and, over time, actually track where that person is going. Would they need a warrant before carrying that out, according to this decision? I admittedly haven’t read the opinions, so I’m just going off of reports (which state that the justices implied that “high tech” means of tracking needed a warrant). I think it’s at least debatable whether there is a right to privacy of information that could also be obtained just by following someone in public spaces.
Hi adelinesdad — I’ve heard this hypothetical before, and we’re probably getting closer and closer to being able to actually carry it out. I find it both fascinating and terrifying. I think that in this case, given that one would theoretically be incapable of monitoring every person all the time, one would need to access some sort of database to get the information involved. Or someone would have to put a “tracker” on the person — in this case their own face, which is recognizable by the software. It’s almost like our own face is the heat coming out of the house, and the cameras all over the place are the infrared sensors. Hellllooooo Big Brother. I’d say following someone everywhere through ubiquitous cameras in the public should require a warrant. Then again, I also think that strict laws of privacy more like in Germany would be much better than what we already have here.
The technology is coming closer. Private homes and companies now have IP(web based) surveillance cameras. No one has any right to the data for these systems – without a warrant. If a person uses an ATM, does banking or goes shopping there is digital imaging to put a person in an area. This private data must remain PRIVATE. Now public cameras and red light cameras are public, but information stored in public servers is a slippery slope.