Police departments are using GPS devices planted on cars to track suspects and criminals as they move around town. Smart policing? You bet. Violation of privacy? Maybe. O.J. Simpson's worst nightmare? Most definitely.
The Global Positioning System, which relies on satellites to fix one’s earthy whereabouts with amazing degrees of precision, is a “how did we ever live without it” technology found in cell phones and navigation devices. Planted surreptitiously on a vehicle, GPS can help police “tail” a person of interest without engaging in expensive, time-consuming and dangerous physical surveillance. That is, if its legality holds up in court.
Cop shops across the country have begun to use GPS to track drug dealers, burglars, sex-offenders, and stalkers, gathering activities from anyone’s vehicle that may be used in the future as evidence during a trial. Because these “searches” occur outside a person’s home or workplace, police have generally not needed to obtain warrants for GPS use. But the Supreme Court has not had the final say on the matter.
Until it does, whether a warrant is required to perform such surveillance will likely ping-pong through the court system. According to data accumulated through the Freedom of Information Act, several police agencies reported using warrantless GPS tracking devices hundreds of times over a three-year period.
Three states are known to have prohibited the warrantless use of GPS devices by police—New York, Washington, and Oregon. Meanwhile, some lower federal courts and the state of Wisconsin have held that the use of GPS devices does not violate the prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. Currently in Wisconsin, a state law requires the Department of Corrections to track the state’s most dangerous sex offenders using GPS.
The main concern has been over an individual’s right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. This of course depends on one’s definition of privacy. While courts generally rule that people do not have the same expectation of privacy in their cars that they have in their homes, technology is quickly intensifying the amount of surveillance that’s possible in the public sphere.
Prosecutors argue that GPS tracking is no different than physical surveillance conducted by police. Police can currently follow you, photograph you, videotape you, and videotape who you are with and where you go in public without a warrant. Opponents of warrantless GPS argue that using a GPS to track someone’s car goes beyond merely observing them in public and thus should require a warrant.
In the 1980s and 1990s, several courts displayed a willingness to adopt protections of individual rights that go beyond the U.S. Constitution. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police could place radio “beepers” in a car without a warrant, which leaves us wondering how they’d react to something of the times.
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