The Department of Justice is asking the Supreme Court to undo a decision that finds warrantless GPS tracking by law enforcement agencies to be unconstitutional.
Antoine Jones of Maryland was convicted to life in prison in a drug case after police tracked his movements via a GPS device attached to his car. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down his conviction based on the GPS device being installed without a warrant.
But the Department of Justice is claiming that suspects can’t expect privacy on public streets.
In 1983, the Supreme Court decided U.S. v. Knotts, which approved law enforcement use of electronic monitoring of vehicles on a public roadway. This set legal precedence for individuals having “no reasonable expectation of privacy,” a point that the Justice Department is citing today.
Matthew Lippman, criminology, law and justice professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, said the claim is accurate. He added that the government is not prohibited from enhancing its visualization through artificial means, like by cameras or tracking devices.
“In other words there would seem to be no Fourth Amendment violation,” Lippman said.
Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, said no one expects to be followed for 24 hours per day.
“Prolonged 24-hour surveillance can reveal highly intimate facts about people,” Crump said. “If you think about every place that you go, who your friends are, meetings you choose to attend, your house of worship, where you go to the therapist, it reveals too much information about a suspect.”
The ability to have a neutral party is the key role of having a judge issue a warrant for surveillance devices, Crump said.
“The purpose here is that the warrant requirement is that someone stands between the government and a surveillance target,” she said. An objective person should decide whether the government has the right to use these devices, she added.
Lippman said the courts seemed to have drawn the line of privacy to the home.
“This is why commentators question whether the Fourth Amendment right to privacy exists outside the home,” he said.
But Crump said that while the Department of Justice sees privacy that way, it is not what the Fourth Amendment means. With limitless abilities to use tracking devices, it makes not just suspects vulnerable, but everyone, she said.
“I think the point we like to drive home [at the ACLU] is that as technology advances, civil liberties should not be left behind,” Crump said. “The Fourth Amendment needs to be updated as technology continues to advance.”
Use of GPS tracking by law enforcement agencies is on the rise, according to a recent piece by David Kravets for Wired. Kravets wrote:
The government told the justices that GPS devices have become a common tool in crime fighting. An officer shooting a dart can affix them to moving vehicles, and recently, a student in California found a tracking device attached to the underside of his car, which the FBI later demanded back.
Three other circuit courts of appeal have already said the authorities do not need a warrant for GPS vehicle tracking.
The Supreme Court has not yet announced whether it will respond to the Department of Justice’s 121-page petition to hear the case.
