Posted on 11/09/2011 5:56:07 AM PST by Ratman83
WASHINGTON – Citizens traveling public highways should have no expectation of privacy just because police are tracking their movements through GPS rather than in person, the U.S. government argued Tuesday in a case before the Supreme Court that pits the interest of law enforcement against individual privacy rights.
The dispute springs from a situation in which police affixed a GPS tracking device to a suspect's car without a proper warrant. It monitored the suspect's movements for several weeks, noting where his vehicle went and how long it stayed at each location.
While much of the data was ultimately excluded as inadmissible in court, after a mistrial the suspect was convicted of conspiring to distribute cocaine.
His lawyer subsequently argued that use of the GPS device violated his Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Google + Facebook + GPS = Skynet = Virtual Big Brother
Yes they sure do want total control.
The standard rule established over time by the SCOTUS. Of course it's idiotic, but then, the 4th amendment asks for this sort of idiocy--what is unreasonable?
Using this test, the more intrusive a government becomes, the more power they have to be intrusive. Once they get away with one intrusion, reasonably, the public's expectation of freedom from searches is diminished. And under that diminished expectation, more intrusions are permissable, and so on, ad infinitum.
The obvious solution is to amend the Constitution, and correct the overly ambiguous wording of the 4th amendment. But too many people like to think the Constitution is perfect, the founders hit the nail on the head, and no one should mess with it.
I see no reason why we the people shouldn't update it from time to time, correcting errors discovered through decades and centuries of use. Most of the bill of rights needs fixing.
permissible. Forgot to spell check.
The element of this story that is being ignored is that people are not considering how this can be applied ten, twenty or fifty years from now with technology available then.
If the supreme court chooses to allow police to put a gps tracker on your vehicle without a warrant, you can assume that very soon all cars will have trackers operating 24/7, and if you are ever a suspect in some FUTURE crime, they can use the warrant to track your every activity going back in time to when the technology was available to them.
Think about that for a second.
And that is not even considering abilities that technology will afford that are currently beyond our imagination, just as this was just a couple of decades ago.
Bottom line, you should not be able to track a person’s movement without a warrant unless it is via human beings. And even then not long term “harassment”.
I’m a law and order guy but fail to see why obtaining a warrant first should be such an impediment.
I wonder if the government could someday require a GPS receiver in all cars and a memory that would record the time and place of travel and automatically report all speeding of 10mph or more over the limit. A fine would be mailed to the registered owner and, in the case of unpaid fines or very high speed driving, the car would shut off. I wouldn’t put this past them.
Most of the bill of rights needs fixing.
What we need is for the Bill of Rights to be followed as they were written, not how they have been trashed by the court.
"The police could have had round-the-clock surveillance on this individual for a whole month or for two months or for three months, and that would not have violated anything, would it?" asked Justice Antonin Scalia.
Worries me.
Yes do it with a warrant upon probable, then it is ok.
No, that's a pipe dream, and totally unworkable. What is unreasonable? How is a judge supposed to decide that? They came up with a rule, which is better than nothing. The wording of the amendment is overly ambiguous, and leads to trouble, as history has shown. It clearly needs to be revised.
The same can be said of many of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. There are some simple and obvious improvements that could be made. If Madison or Jefferson came back to life and proposed these improvements, the same people who tell me I'm wrong would be all for it. These people are actually failing to use what is probably the best part of the Constitution---the amendment process.
Ok. So what is unreasonable? What does the wording of the 4th amendment tell us about that? How is a judge supposed to decide what is or isn’t “reasonable.” Since all we have to do is follow the wording, use only the wording to explain your answer.
Because a warrant is issued by a judge and some judges won't grant one in cases where there is no probable cause. Authorities now can bypass that "picky" judge.
Our basic freedoms are being eroded, sometimes incrementally, some times by stealth and some times by blatant leaps and bounds.
Application of the 9th and 10th would eliminate many of the government excess of today.
Talk about being a pipe dream. Any attempt to revise the constitution at this point will result in the total trashing of our rights by government and the left. Not one politician will stick up for our rights in the redo they will be looking to make things better for themselves. Going down that road will lead to a new civil war.
This is a political question that doesn't change the facts at all. The fact is the Bill of Rights needs revisions. Whether or not the body politic is competent to do it is an important question, but it doesn't change the facts.
I agree with you that the body politic is incompetent to make the needed changes. But those changes remain necessary, and in some cases, obvious.
Further, the mischief you describe would arise in a convention, but not out of a single drafted and proposed amendment. The amendment is written, if it passes the Congress, it goes to the states. The debate and action is limited to that amendment. There is no can of worms in that scenario.
In the end, either we are capable of self-government or we aren't. The perils associated with doing nothing are obvious and ongoing. The biggest problem is that our side is unwilling to even acknowledge what is necessary, choosing instead to believe in fairy tales.
Well find out as soon as some wiseacre affixes a GPS device to a police car. That should tie up our entire Federal Court System for at least thirteen years.
huh huh, been there, done that. Use Firefox as your browser, it does it automatically—the main reason I made the switch from IE 9. :)
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