Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Police Need a Warrant to Track Suspects by GPS

Any faith remaining in the US Supreme Court after the stupid and irrational decision in Bush v Gore (stop counting votes in an election?) was shattered in the inept and evil Citizens United case (one will admit a corporation has the same rights as a human when Rick Perry has one executed in Texas). So when the supremes vote 9-0 in favor of civil liberties, it is beyond a pleasant surprise. They did just that in stating that the police need a warrant to track someone using a GPS device attached to a vehicle.

The case is a rather mundane one in which police tracked nightclub owner Antoine Jones using a GPS device they planted on his car. After tracking him for weeks, he was busted for cocaine trafficking and sentenced to life in prison. The case should have been bounced on the facts. As the Washington Post reported, "Law enforcement could have avoided the issue in 2005 if officers had more closely followed the instructions of a judge who issued a warrant authorizing the use of the GPS device. The judge said it had to be installed within 10 days while Jones's Jeep was in Washington. Instead, it was installed after 11 days, while the vehicle was in Maryland." That is, the warrant was not valid, so the preserve the conviction the government argued that a warrant was unnecessary (in which case, one wonders why the police went to the trouble of securing a warrant).

The Supreme Court disagreed with the government's assertion. "We hold that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a 'search,'" Justice Scalia wrote in his decision. Joining him in his decsion were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

What brings joy to the heart of all instinctual anarchists is the reasoning offered by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan accepted. He wrote "the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society's expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not -- and indeed, in the main, simply could not -- secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual's car for a very long period."

For anyone who has spent any time in an authoritarian or totalitarian society, that is the great difference between such places and open civilizations -- the expectation that one is being watched prevails in the former while residents of the latter expect a certain degree of privacy even when in public.

The technological leap forward that the Internet and wireless communications represent are, by any measure, forms of genuine progress. The world and the lives of people are better because of them. However, changes always carries a price tag, and the loss of at least some privacy seems to be the price to be paid for these developments. In this instance, the Supreme Court has done a very conservative and laudable thing; as William F. Buckley stated a consevative stands athwart (he was a sailor) history shouting "stop!" Here, the court cried "stop" in defense of the simple idea that the government cannot watch a citizen's movements using electronic methods for weeks on end without a valid warrant.



© Copyright 2011 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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