U.S. Supreme Court Rules That Police Require Warrant To Place GPS On Car: Looking To "The Meaning Of The Fourth Amendment When It Was Adopted."

The USA Today reports:

In a major decision on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that police need a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a person's car...

The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally developed for the military, relies on satellites that transmit to receivers that calculate the latitude and longitude of a location. A GPS device installed by police can be used to follow a person 24 hours a day. Data can be collected and analyzed far more efficiently and economically than if a team of agents followed a person.

The court reversed the cocaine-trafficking conviction of a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner. In 2005, police attached a GPS device to a Jeep owned by Antoine Jones while it was parked in a public lot. Agents then used evidence of Jones' travels over four weeks to help win the conviction on conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Civil libertarians and defense lawyers praised the ruling in United States v. Jones. The "Fourth Amendment must continue to protect against government intrusions even in the face of modern technological surveillance tools," said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which was among the groups that sided with Jones. The Justice Department, which had appealed a lower court decision requiring a warrant for GPS tracking, had no public response to the decision.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the main opinion for the court, said "the government's physical intrusion on the Jeep" to obtain information constitutes a search. He based his decision on the original roots of Fourth Amendment protection for property against government intrusions. Scalia was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

What is best about this opinion is that it is rooted in the original meaning of the Constitution, applying those first principles to new technologies. As Supreme Court Justice Scalia importantly wrote, "We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted." Tweet