US supreme court rules: GPS Tracking Requires a Warrant

[Princess Luna]

Today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police need a search warrant before they can track a suspect's movements by attaching a GPS device to his car. The case involved a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner, Antoine Jones, who was convicted of cocaine trafficking and sentenced to life in prison based largely on information police obtained through GPS tracking of his Jeep. In 2010 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned Jones' conviction, ruling that the warrantless tracking violated the Fourth Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures." Upholding that decision today, the Supreme Court ruled that the physical intrusion on Jones' car required to attach the tracking device represented the sort of trespass that was meant to be covered by the Fourth Amendment, which applies to people's "effects" as well as their homes. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia that was joined by four other justices (John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor), said it was therefore unnecessary to address the question of whether Jones had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" regarding his public movements. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion, joined by three other justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan), that said Jones did have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information collected via GPS tracking of his car:

Relatively short-term monitoring of a person’s movements on public streets accords with expectations of privacy that our society has recognized as reasonable….But the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period/ In this case, for four weeks, law enforcement agents tracked every movement that [Jones] made in the vehicle he was driving. We need not identify with precisionthe point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/01/23/scotus-unanimously-rules-that-gps-tracki

Considering how many times in the past the Supreme court has allowed police to completely violate people's privacy without a warrant,this ruling really surprises me and It is even more suprising that this was a unanimous decision. . Another case that is in the supreme court pipeline, is rather police can use dogs to sniff around the outside peoples houses without a warrant, and then enter the residence based on what the dog does. I am still not getting my hopes up, but the future looks a little less bleak.

[ckaihatsu]

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Warrantless GPS surveillance

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the contentious case involving the government’s GPS surveillance of an individual in Washington, DC without a warrant.

This case, United States v. Jones, was chiefly significant for the position taken by the Obama administration, which asserted that there was no limit on the government’s ability to secretly track any individual using GPS, without a warrant, and to compile that information for use in criminal prosecutions. (See, “Obama administration defends unlimited warrantless GPS surveillance before Supreme Court”)

During oral argument last autumn, the following exchange took place between Chief Justice Roberts and Obama’s deputy solicitor general, Michael R. Dreeben:

Roberts: Your argument is, it doesn’t depend how much suspicion you have, it doesn’t depend on how urgent it is. Your argument is you can do it, period. You don’t have to give any reason. It doesn’t have to be limited in any way, right?

Dreeben: That is correct, Mr. Chief Justice.

Several of the justices, during oral argument, were clearly rattled by the Obama administration’s provocative assertion that the government could even collect GPS data on the activities and daily whereabouts of the nine Supreme Court justices themselves. References to George Orwell’s novel 1984 were made six times during oral argument.

GPS devices, by means of satellite triangulation, are able to precisely indicate the location of targeted individuals to within, in some cases, a few feet. Government agents had surreptitiously installed a GPS device on nightclub owner Antone Jones’ car and then monitored and recorded his movements for four weeks without interruption.

Even the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, perhaps the most right-wing court in the country, thought the Obama administration had overstepped itself. “A person who knows all of another’s travels,” the DC Circuit wrote, “can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups, and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

In its decision Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s position, finding that the secret GPS surveillance of Jones without a warrant or judicial oversight of any kind was clearly unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court was split 5-4 as to the rationale. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that the government “intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted” in 1791. Scalia’s opinion was joined by Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

In writing for the minority, Justice Samuel Alito said instead, that “reasonable expectations of privacy were violated by the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle [Jones] drove.” Alito’s opinion was joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Bryer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Fourth Amendment to the US constitution protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and requires that the government obtain a warrant to conduct a search. Historically, the Fourth Amendment has been understood to offer protection from searches and seizures where there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The doctrine of Scalia and company, falsely proclaiming itself to be the “original” understanding of the Bill of Rights, would limit the protections of the Fourth Amendment to those factual circumstances that could have arisen in 1791. Accordingly, in his opinion in United States v. Jones, Scalia analogizes GPS surveillance to a constable hiding in the back of an 18th century stagecoach to record its movements.

Scalia’s “originalism,” as codified in United States v. Jones, places in doubt a long line of precedent grounded in the formulation that the Fourth Amendment applies wherever there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Thus, the Supreme Court’s opinion, beneath the appearance of upholding the Fourth Amendment, paves the way for future attacks.

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/jan2012/cour-j24.shtml