Monday, January 23, 2012
Got a GPS tracker? Need a warrant for that
In a surprising decision, surprising because it actually supported the rights of citizens, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the use of GPS tracking devices by the police required a warrant.
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and tracked its movements for 28 days.An interesting division.
But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies...
In a concurrence for four justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. faulted the majority for trying to apply 18th-century legal concepts to 21st-century technologies. What should matter, he said, is the contemporary reasonable expectation of privacy.
“The use of longer term G.P.S. monitoring in investigations of most offenses,” he wrote, “impinges on expectations of privacy.” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the concurrence.
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