US High Court: Warrant Needed For GPS Tracking

[MNeagle]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=145639480

WASHINGTON January 23, 2012, 11:28 am ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court says police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.

The court ruled in the case of Washington nightclub owner Antoine Jones. A federal appeals court in Washington overturned his drug conspiracy conviction because police did not have a warrant when they installed a satellite device known as a GPS on his vehicle and then tracked his movements for a month.

The device helped authorities link Jones to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned the conviction. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court.

[iOWNme]

Do you own your car? (insert sarcastic smiley here)

Is the outside of your car considered 'in public'? Is the inside considered the same?

Maybe Cops should just respect the LAW, and stop trying to subvert it at every chance they get.

Kops HATE due process, the 4th Amendment and the BoR. Why? Because they are MARXIST commies, hell bent on destroying the very core of what made this country the greatest country in the history of the world.

[BrewTech]

That's OK, they'll just have a box at the front of the bench marked

WARRANTS

FREE! TAKE ONE!

[SWRichmond]

So does this mean that the cops will have to sneak back in at night and retrieve the ones they've illegally installed?

[Awoke]

Frig, I had a weird dream last night.

I dreamt that I was pulled over by a pig for speeding, but I was driving 5km under the limit.
He flagged my car and the car in front of me. Ordered us both to pull over.

I said "I don't know why you are pulling me over officer, but I know it can't be for speeding"
He basically said "Oh, you thinks so, eh?" and ordered us to exit our vehicles and follow him for about 30 feet into a field.

He then started to lecture us about speeding and the dangers, etc. I maintained that I wasn't speeding, and he said this was just a warning.

Then he said "We have a neighborhood watch type of program and people call in when they see people speeding into our district, and our dispatch center is right in the synagogue, so we have immediate information available to us at all times!"

I LOLed when I woke up. In my dream the cop was a ginger, and he was saying it as if I should be impressed with the fact that they were running their branch of the police station from the synagogue. What the heck kind of dream is that?

haha!

[mick silver]

they will just write a bill to work around this and make a new law ... they who write the laws can write what the f they want

[iOWNme]

Does this repeal certain sections of the US Patriot Act?

The Patriot act allows Federal GOON Agents to write their own warrants before executing them. Just like the Townshend Act of 1767, and the Stamp act of 1765.

1776 is just around the corner.......

[MNeagle]

Don't all cell phones have automatic GPS in them??

What are the rules(laws) w/ those then?

[iOWNme]

Take a look at what the Justices had to say. You can bet your ass they are tracking every single thing they possibly can electronically. They are little Satanic minions just waiting to spy on your every movement, and to log every facet of your very existence.

Dont forget to read the very last paragraph of this article tucked away on the second page of the NYTimes. Very interesting......

Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/us/police-use-of-gps-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html?_r=1&emc=eta1


WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org) on Monday unanimously ruled (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf) that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days.

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.

Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting United States solicitor general, said the decision “is a signal event in Fourth Amendment history.”

“Law enforcement is now on notice,” he said, “that almost any use of G.P.S. electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”

Though the ruling was limited to physical intrusions, the opinions in the case collectively suggested that a majority of the justices are prepared to apply broad Fourth Amendment privacy principles unrelated to such intrusions to an array of modern technologies, including video surveillance in public places, automatic toll collection systems on highways, devices that allow motorists to signal for roadside assistance and records kept by online merchants.

The case decided Monday, United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a valid warrant, tracked his movements for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned his conviction (https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/US_v_Jones/maynard_decision.pdf), saying the sheer amount of information that had been collected violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches.

The Supreme Court affirmed that decision, but on a different ground. “We hold that the government’s installation of a G.P.S. device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’ ” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined the majority opinion.

“It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case,” Justice Scalia went on. “The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”

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.

“We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark,” Justice Alito wrote. “Other cases may present more difficult questions.”

The leading Supreme Court precedent in the area, United States v. Knotts (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=460&invol=276) in 1983, allowed the use of a much more primitive technology, a beeper that sent a signal that grew stronger as the police drew closer and so helped them follow a car over a single 100-mile trip from Minnesota to Wisconsin.

The Knotts case was different, Justice Scalia wrote, because the police had placed the beeper in a container of chemicals before the suspect accepted it. In the Jones case, by contrast, “officers encroached on a protected area.”

Justice Scalia added that the majority did not mean to suggest that its property-rights theory of the Fourth Amendment displaced the one focused on expectations of privacy.

“It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question,” he wrote. .

He acknowledged that Monday’s decision left “thorny problems” for another day. But “there is no reason for rushing forward to resolve them here,” he wrote
Justice Sotomayor joined the majority opinion, agreeing that many questions could be left for another day “because the government’s physical intrusion on Jones’s Jeep supplies a narrower basis for decision.”

But she seemed to leave little doubt that she would have joined Justice Alito’s analysis had the issue he addressed been the exclusive one presented in the case.
“Physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. In the case of G.P.S. devices, she wrote, “I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on.”

She went on to suggest that “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.”

“People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers,” she wrote. “I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”

Justice Alito listed other “new devices that permit the monitoring of a person’s movements” that fit uneasily with traditional Fourth Amendment privacy analysis.
“In some locales,” he wrote, “closed-circuit television video monitoring is becoming ubiquitous. On toll roads, automatic toll collection systems create a precise record of the movements of motorists who choose to make use of that convenience. Many motorists purchase cars that are equipped with devices that permit a central station to ascertain the car’s location at any time so that roadside assistance may be provided if needed and the car may be found if it is stolen.

“Perhaps most significant, cellphones and other wireless devices now permit wireless carriers to track and record the location of users — and as of June 2011, it has been reported, there were more than 322 million wireless devices in use in the United States.”

[BrewTech]

As far as cell phones are concerned, it seems to me that people willingly, hell, enthusiastically, waive their right to any privacy while using them.

Foursquare, anyone?