(2010-11-30) Warrantless Gps Tracking

*The Barack Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The Justice Department is demanding a federal appeals court rehear a case in which it reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer (War On Drugs, not Terrorism) whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month, without a court warrant. The authorities then obtained warrants to search and find drugs in the locations where defendant Antoine Jones had travelled.

The administration, in urging the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reverse a three-judge panel’s August ruling from the same court, said Monday that Americans should expect no Privacy while in public.*

Jan'2012 update: United States v. Jones, 565 US _, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012), is a 2012 Supreme Court of the United States case regarding government's installation and prolonged use of a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device.[1] The government installed a GPS device on the suspect's car and exceeded the scope of its warrant by continuously monitoring the car's location for 28 days.[2] Although the Court asked parties to address whether "the warrantless use of a tracking device on respondent's vehicle to monitor its movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment," the Court's ruling was narrower than its question presented.[3] On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously held 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'" under the Fourth Amendment.[4] The court did not address whether such a search would be unreasonable and therefore a violation of the Fourth Amendment.