U.S. Supreme Court: GPS Trackers Are a Form of Search and Seizure
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/supreme-court-if-youre-being-gps-tracked-youre-being-searched/389114/It doesnt matter what the context is, and it doesnt matter whether its a car or a person. Putting that tracking device on a car or a person is a search, said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)...In this case, that context was punishment. Grady was twice convicted as a sex offender. In 2013, North Carolina ordered that, as a recidivist, he had to wear a GPS monitor at all times so that his location could be monitored. He challenged the court, saying that the tracking device qualified as an unreasonable search. North Carolinas highest court at first ruled that the tracker was no search at all. Its that decision that the Supreme Court took aim at today, quoting the states rationale and snarking:
Then it lists a series of Supreme Court precedents. And there are a few, as the Court has considered the Fourth Amendment quite a bit recently. In 2012, it ruled that placing a GPS tracker on a suspects car, without a warrant, counted as an unreasonable search. The following year, it said that using drug-sniffing dogs around a suspects front porchwithout a warrant and without their consentwas also unreasonable, as it trespassed onto a persons property to gain information about them. Both of those cases involved suspects, but the ruling Monday made clear that it extends to those convicted of crimes, too.
But much remains unclear about how the Fourth Amendment interacts with digital technology. The Court so far has only ruled on cases where location information was collected by a GPS tracker. But countless devices today collect geographic information. Smartphones often contain their own GPS monitors and can triangulate their location from nearby cell towers; electronic toll-collection systems like E-ZPass register, by default, a cars location and when it passed through a toll road. Lynch, the EFF attorney, said that the justices seem to know that theyll soon have to rule on whether this kind of geo-locational information is protected.
She also said that those questions are more fraught for the Court than ones just involving GPS tracker data. Some members of the Court, including Justice Antonin Scalia, argue the Fourth Amendment turns on whether the government has trespassed on someones private property. Other membersrepresented in arguments by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alitosay that people have a reasonable expectation to the privacy of their location data. For now, Mondays ruling will force lower courts to consider whether attaching a GPS tracker to someone or something is a reasonable search, Lynch said. It makes very clear to state courts and lower courts considering this issue that at least they have to get to that point, she told me.
MORE
Igel
(35,356 posts)Is it an unreasonable search to follow somebody? That is, to physically track their location in the time-worn methods ascribed to gumshoes of yore?
Or does it really depend crucially on the unwarranted (literally) placing of some device on their personal property?
Would that extend to the unwarranted activation of a device or app already on their property?
What about reading the information that the app or device already routinely sends to a cell tower, whether that's default factory settings, settings made by somebody else (say, a girlfriend who tinkers with her boyfriend's phone), or by the owner for a different purpose?
Isn't that just intercepting the electromagnetic radiation that the person's already sending out? But that might be unconstitutional. The police might need a warrant to do that.
But if I follow somebody and monitor where they are on their property using visible light, isn't that just intercepting the EM radiation that the person's already sending out?
And if we want to say that it's a difference in technology, let's split the difference and consider the use of IR devices. We need (non-digital) tech, but we use EM radiation that's naturally emitted. If the police used night-vision goggles to monitor somebody on their own property at night, are IR "signals" privacy data? Instead of an ultraviolet catastrophe, it's more of an infrared catastrophe as we go from visible-yet-unprotected in one direction or tech-mediated-and-protected in the other.
I have to assume that this issue's already been litigated (and possibly legislated) wrt the use of sensitive IR-detection equipment for, say, "peering" though thin barriers using IR where presumably the existence of the barrier constitutes some evidence of a desire to actively preserve privacy and escape public view.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)but glad that so far the Supremes are focused on preserving indiv. rights.