Can Law Enforcement Attach a GPS Tracker to Your Car with No Warrant?
By: Steve Grumm
The last car I owned was a 1991 Honda Civic. If the police attached a GPS tracker to it, my car would have quadrupled in value. But that’s beside the point.
Yesterday in U.S. v. Jones the Supreme Court heard arguments on the questions of whether, according to SCOTUSblog:
(1) Whether the warrantless use of a tracking device on respondent’s vehicle to monitor its movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment; and (2) whether the government violated respondent’s Fourth Amendment rights by installing the GPS tracking device on his vehicle without a valid warrant and without his consent.
Supreme Court observers generally found the high court wary of such government power. A National Law Journal recap from Marcia Coyle offers:
Police use of GPS surveillance and society’s expectations of privacy clashed in the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday as justices weighed new technology and its impact on Fourth Amendment rights.
With multiple references to the novel 1984, a majority of the justices seemed uncomfortable with the federal government’s defense of law enforcement’s warrantless use of a GPS tracking device on a suspected drug dealer’s car over a four-week period. But the justices also struggled to find a legal way to regulate that type of surveillance.
Writing in SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denison notes:
The argument in the much-anticipated case of U.S. v. Jones (docket 10-1259) left a solid impression: the Court, though it is unsure just how much privacy remains in the new digital world, does know just enough about the GPS device to see in it a considerable threat to people’s right to be let alone.
