Constitutional Law

Un-Warranted GPS Tracking

When District of Columbia police arrested Antoine Jones in 2005, they were following a pair of articles that Jones had been transporting. One was the 213 pound load of cocaine in his possession – the largest such seizure ever in the DC area. The other was the GPS tracking system that police attached to Jones's car outside of the scope of an applicable warrant.

Now, Jones's conviction and sentencing to life in prison are in limbo.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering arguments over whether the government must obtain a search warrant before tracking criminal suspects by GPS. In the case of Jones, the FBI obtained a warrant to attach such a device to his car, but only in D.C. Instead, police placed the device on his car in Maryland and did so after the warrant expired. They then recorded the device's position every ten seconds for a month, producing 3,000 pages of records.

'It's an important issue because this ever-improving technology, if not subject to careful court supervision, will allow the government to turn into Big Brother in [a] way that is not far removed from what George Orwell foresaw in 1984,' said Art Spitzer, ACLU National Capital Area legal director.

Prosecutors in Jones's jury trial disagreed in their 2006 brief: 'Because Jones lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle, the placement of the GPS device was proper, even in the complete absence of a court order.'

According to Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, Supreme Court precedent on such an issue is muddled. 'These cases are very interesting because they raise a classic tension between technology and privacy,' he said. 'The Supreme Court has often had to alter its privacy doctrine to adjust for technological advances.'

Full post as published by ACS Blog on March 04, 2009 (boomark / email).