Supreme Court says no to warrantless GPS
The Supreme Court made a great ruling yesterday, unanimously declaring that, absent a warrant or probable cause, it is unconstitutional for police to track people’s movements by attaching a GPS device to their car.
As Justice Sotomayor points out:
“GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familiar, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations … The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future … And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.’ “
Read the full text of the ruling, in the case of United States v. Antoine Jones, here.