The Court & The GPS Device

Most Americans seem to inured to the fact the government — in concert with the corporate sector — has found a zillion ways to pillage their privacy over the last decade using an ever-evolving range of technology: police who stop you on the side of the road can now extract everything from your cell phone if you’re naive enough to hand it to them for even a second. Police can also tell if you have outstanding parking tickets just by trolling a parking lot and aiming a laser thingy at your license plate. At the same time, Verizon has found a way to harvest all of your personal information — buying, surfing, even where you might stop off for a coffee — and sell it to the highest bidder. At some point, it might be the police or the federal government who come calling for that info — whether they have a warrant or not–  and they won’t need to pay. If you are unlucky enough to be the target of a criminal investigation — or perhaps just tied in someway to someone who is (a boyfriend? a family member?), the police think they can, without a warrant, affix a GPS monitor under the carriage of your car — anywhere you can’t see it — and follow you around for as long as they like. Apparently tired of wearing the shoe leather down through good old fashioned police work, police have been doing this for a while. There have been conflicting rulings about whether tracking people with GPS without warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right against unlawful search and seizure. One such complaint was brought to court by a drug dealer appealing his conviction which was based in part on the use of GPS tracking and led to a life sentence in prison. The DC Federal Court of Appeals was the first court to challenge the practice when it threw out Antoine Jones’ conviction in 2010, finding that the use of GPS to follow him 24-hours a day for a month violated his Constitutional rights. The Justice Department is appealing, and that is where the case stands now, in the High Court. This is a big one. The next critical test of that ever-thinning line between what constitutes technological evolution and what is in fact, the irrevocable erosion of one’s personal freedoms as codified by the Constitution. How will the justices rule? If they side with the government, most of us know that the aforementioned slippery slope will have hit an ice patch toward an all-out surveillance state: just take a look at the UK. They had to start somewhere...more