Across the country, police are using GPS devices to snare thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators and killers, often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell's Big Brother society. Law enforcement officials, when they discuss the issue at all, said GPS is essentially the same as having an officer trail someone, just cheaper and more accurate. Most of the time ... judges have sided with police.
Advocates of GPS tracking argue that drivers have no reasonable expectation of privacy on public streets. GPS tracking, however, isn't confined to public travel. It shows the locations of cars that have entered private structures or that drive along private roads on private property -- places a trailing law enforcement officer would be unable to follow.
The devices are becoming ubiquitous. Says TL blogger emeritus Last Night in Little Rock:
"I've seen them in cases from New York City to small towns -- whoever can afford to get the equipment and plant it on a car," said John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "And of course, it's easy to do. You can sneak up on a car and plant it at any time."
The use of technology to snoop is a growing problem for those who worry about the government's lack of respect for privacy:
Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, considers GPS monitoring, along with license plate readers, toll transponders and video cameras with face-recognition technology, part of the same trend toward "an always-on, surveillance society."
"Things that would have seemed fantastic 15 years ago are now routine," he said. "We have to rethink what is a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Whether the Supreme Court will eventually decide that a warrant is needed to indulge in GPS tracking is unclear. It would be nice to think there might be a political solution -- legislation requiring the police to obtain a warrant before tracking our movements with GPS technology -- but the "tough on crime" crowd, the folks who value security over liberty, will not easily let that happen.
