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Posted on 01/23/2012 11:27:29 AM PST by neverdem
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.
The decision was a defeat for the government and police agencies, and it raises the possibility of serious complications for law enforcement nationwide, which increasingly relies on high tech surveillance of suspects, including the use of various types of GPS technology.
--snip--
"The use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy," Alito wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor in her concurring opinion specifically said she agreed with Alito on this conclusion.
Alito added, "We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the four-week mark."...
(Excerpt) Read more at entertainment.verizon.com ...
NYPD will lose in the SCOTUS, IMHO.
What this means is that NYPD can’t stick their trackers on just anybody. There has to be a reason that rises to the level of a court determination. Wise decision.
The article discusses that issue.
Check one off for the side of Freedom and justice for all.
Finally some common sense in the Law.
I hate to say it, but I agree with the ACLU’s comments. Stopped clock and all that . . .
It’s too bad they’re such communists, because every once in awhile they do important work.
By 2020, every aircraft in the U.S. will be required to provide GPS tracking information to the government. After this decision, maybe not.
“it raises the possibility of serious complications for law enforcement nationwide”
Aw, poor them. They can’t unilaterally make their jobs perpetually easier. Now they have to go out and do real police work. What a shame.
The positions and directions of aircraft are a matter of health and safety. IMHO, that's the Federal Aviation and Administration argument, and they'll win with it. By virtue of traveling, they are in public. Snooping about their personal effects is another matter.
While the court certainly went the right way on this, LE will simply resort to the same 'confidential informants' and judges they now go to in order to secure no-knock warrants for wrong addresses.
I don’t think a clerical error that resulted in the wrong car being tracked would result in the tracking of that car being admitted in evidence. Not quite like a Swat raid, the tracker does not blow your car’s head off.
Never rely on what the media says a court ruled.
The Court didn’t decide whether a warrant was needed. All it decided was that the installation of a GPS device was a search.
The search analysis is two parts. First, “Was there a search”? (The court said that there was.) Second, “If there was a search, was it reasonable.” (The Court didn’t decide this issue.)
“The Government argues in the alternative that even if the attachment and use of the device was a search, it was reasonable—and thus lawful—under the Fourth Amendment because “officers had reasonable suspicion, and in-deed probable cause, to believe that [Jones] was a leader in a large-scale cocaine distribution conspiracy.” Brief for United States 50–51. We have no occasion to consider this argument. The Government did not raise it below, and the D. C. Circuit therefore did not address it. See 625 F. 3d, at 767 (Ginsburg, Tatel, and Griffith, JJ., concurring in denial of rehearing en banc). We consider the argument forfeited. See Sprietsma v. Mercury Marine, 537 U. S. 51, 56, n. 4 (2002).”
Epic media fail.
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