And you thought "Enemy of the State" was just a movie.
"Court wrestles with police use of GPS" November 09, 2011|Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court invoked visions of an all-seeing Big Brother and satellites watching from above. Then things got personal yesterday when the justices were told police could slap GPS devices on their cars and track their movements, without asking a judge for advance approval.
The occasion for all the talk about intrusive police actions was a hearing in a case about whether the police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The outcome could have implications for other high-tech surveillance methods as well.
The justices expressed deep reservations about warrantless GPS tracking. But there also was no clear view about how - or whether to - regulate police use of the devices.
The justices were taken aback when the lawyer representing the government said police officers could install GPS devices on the justices’ cars and track their movements without a warrant. To get a warrant, investigators need to convince a judge that there is reason to believe a suspect is involved in criminal activity.
“So your answer is yes, you could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month; no problem under the Constitution?’’ Chief Justice John Roberts said.
Not only that, government lawyer Michael Dreeben replied, but FBI agents wouldn’t need a warrant either, if they wanted to rummage through the justices’ trash, use a low-tech beeper to track them, or tail them around-the-clock. Dreeben said the court has previously ruled that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in those circumstances.
Why did the word Gestapo just pop into my head?
Justice Samuel Alito expressed the court’s concern: “With computers around, it’s now so simple to amass an enormous amount of information. How do we deal with this? Just say nothing has changed?’’
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FLASHBACK:
"Supreme Court set to weigh in on the use of GPS to track suspects" September 11, 2011|By Adam Liptak, New York Times
WASHINGTON - In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984’’ to sound an alarm.
They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described.
In April, Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote that the surveillance using GPS devices would “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.’’ In a similar case last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.’’
Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the US District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion’’ and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.’’
The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time? Their answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures’’ applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously and comprehensively recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.
The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.
“The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,’’ said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
The case is an appeal from a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said last year that the government was simply seeking too much information.
“Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of those places in the course of a month,’’ wrote Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg.
He added: “A person who knows all of another’s travel 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.’’
Federal appeals courts in Chicago and San Francisco, on the other hand, have allowed the police to use GPS tracking devices without a warrant. The police are already allowed to tail cars and observe their movements without warrants, those courts said, and the devices merely allow them to do so more efficiently.
Yes, I love an efficient fascist state, don't you?
Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel in the Chicago case, did caution that institutionalized mass surveillance might present a different issue.
The case to be heard by the Supreme Court arose from the investigation of the owner of a Washington nightclub, Antoine Jones, who was suspected of being part of a cocaine-selling operation.
Apparently out of caution given the unsettled state of the law, prosecutors obtained a warrant allowing police to place a tracking device on Jones’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. The warrant required them to do so within 10 days and within the District of Columbia. The police did not install the device until 11 days later, and they did it in Maryland. Now contending that no warrant was required, the authorities tracked Jones’s travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Of course, it is OKAY for the POLICE to BREAK the LAW, 'eh?
The main Supreme Court precedent in the area, United States v. Knotts, is almost 30 years old. It allowed the use of a much more primitive technology, a beeper that sent a signal that grew stronger as the police drew closer.
I'm reading a primitive pos.
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And the verdict?
"Supreme Court limits police use of GPS tracking; Officials must get warrants, justices rule" by Adam Liptak | New York Times, January 24, 2012
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday 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 ruling avoided many difficult questions....
Although 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.
After checking their car when leaving the courthouse.
The case decided yesterday 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 vehicle without a 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 government hates competition.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned his conviction, 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....
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