For whatever reason, the U.S. Supreme Court always seems to have an entertaining case on the docket when it is Election Day, and this year is no different as the justices will hear arguments on whether police need permission to track a suspect with a GPS device.
This is a major Fourth Amendment case that deals with a fairly basic question – should the police have to get a warrant from a court before placing a GPS device on your vehicle to track where you are going?
A federal appeals court here in Washington, D.C. ruled against the concept of warrantless-GPS tracking, saying police must have the consent of a court for prolonged surveillance.
“A reasonable person does not expect anyone to monitor and retain a record of every time he drives his car, including his origin, route, destination, and each place he stops and how long he stays there,” the ruling from August of 2010 stated.
“A search conducted without a warrant is ― per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment — subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions,” the appellate court ruled, citing previous case law.
The reason this case has people using the term “landmark” is that with new technology comes new questions about how it should be handled by the Constitution.
The feds argue that if police tracked suspects visually, watching them drive across town and back home and all in between – no warrant would be needed – so the GPS device is just like that.
Usually a “search” is found to have occurred when police the government pries far enough that it starts getting information not usually available in public.
Is that the case with a GPS tracker attached to the underside of your bumper?
Would you consider it “okay” for a police officer to crawl under your car and attach a GPS tracker? Or would that action constitute a “search and seizure” in legal terms?
It’s not an easy answer by any means.
The basic issue here is privacy – do you as a citizen have an expectation that police won’t attach some kind of electronic surveillance gizmo to your vehicle, unless they have a warrant?
This is the biggest case argued yet in the 2011-2012 term of the Supreme Court, but it’s likely to be overshadowed maybe later this week, when the justices could accept a series of legal challenges to the Obama health reform law.
