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Warrantless GPS Tracking Is Legal, Says WI Court
PL/SQL Guy writes "A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."
Laws and amendments need to keep up with game changing technological development.
If it's only vehicle location track, how is this different than having the police tail the vehicle or follow it via helicopter, etc. This seems like a lower-cost mechanism for doing the same thing. Is there more to it than that?
This is why we have the Bill of Rights. Because governments will trample on personal freedom at their whim unless controlled by the law or the people.
This ad space for rent.
On the one hand, you've got the theory that this is analogous to assigning an officer to watch and tail a suspect's car, which is perfectly legal without a warrant.
On the other hand, you have, for example, things like Kyllo v. United States, where using thermal imaging equipment was treated as a search even though ordinary visual observation from off the property is not.
I suspect a higher court would rule that GPS devices are more common in civilian use than thermal imaging, and that when driving your car in public you have no reasonable expectation that your movement will be unobserved, and so rule that this court got it right, there is no Fourth Amendment violation.
You sir are a genius. Let's start to track down politician cars and update their locations real time to a web site.
And then let's see how long it takes for them to change the law.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
From August 14, 2008 - http://www.insidetech.com/news/articles/2833-police-planting-gps-trackers-on-cars-without-warrants
Privacy advocates are shocked. They say that by monitoring the movements of people, many of which are likely innocent, police departments across the country are committing a Big Brother-esque invasion of privacy. And one state Supreme Court is on their side. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled that a warrant must be obtained to justify such invasions of privacy.
However, other state supreme courts - including New York, Wisconsin and Maryland, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago - have declared that warrants are not needed.
First - way to go, State of Washington.
Next, it's not cut and dried, legally. From TFA:
Sveum, 41, argued the tracking violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. He argued the device followed him into areas out of public view, such as his garage.
The court disagreed. The tracking did not violate constitutional protections because the device only gave police information that could have been obtained through visual surveillance, Lundsten wrote.
Even though the device followed Sveum's car to private places, an officer tracking Sveum could have seen when his car entered or exited a garage, Lundsten reasoned. Attaching the device was not a violation, he wrote, because Sveum's driveway is a public place.
"We discern no privacy interest protected by the Fourth Amendment that is invaded when police attach a device to the outside of a vehicle, as long as the information obtained is the same as could be gained by the use of other techniques that do not require a warrant," he wrote.
Although police obtained a warrant in this case, it wasn't needed, he added.
Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said using GPS to track someone's car goes beyond observing them in public and should require a warrant.
"The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else's property without any court supervision, that's wrong," he said. "Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want."
So, what the real issue? Surveillance? Like it or not, that's legal. A cop can follow you all day long, so far as I know, as long as it doesn't amount to what a judge would call harassment. (That said, a judge's threshold and mine are probably quite different.)
Or is the real issue as the ACLU says, the attachment of a (police) device to property without court supervision?
I'm going with the ACLU on this one. Bond used a homer(*) 45 years ago in Goldfinger, and that was cool - or so we thought, because the of the target. But when I think now that the pursuer had a license to kill - I wonder if the future shouldn't be protected very, very carefully.
(* - Yep, they called it a homer in the movie. Nonetheless, cue Simpsons' jokes in ...3...2...)
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
6 man EOD team response, more like $10k. What are they going to do, NOT respond when you call about a potential bomb on your car?
No, they'll surround your car with sandbags and water barriers and blow it up.
It pays to think these things through.
Isn't this a moot point with mobile phones?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
How can warrantless GPS tracking be legal while warrantless car searching is illegal.
Police don't need a warrant to follow a car, and in my opinion, GPS tracking is more akin to tailing a car than searching through it. I'm not thrilled by this ruling, but it doesn't seem blatantly unconstitutional.
I'm not quite sure you're correct there. It's rather ironic that the case here involved someone suspected of stalking. Stalking also can be no more than following someone around and watching them in public places, yet it's something most areas have laws against. The only difference here is that the "stalker" is a police officer. Do you have any doubts that if it were found that the person suspected of "stalking" had covertly put GPS trackers on his victim's cars, they wouldn't nail him in a second? It would seem to me that if this type of behavior would be potentially criminal if done by someone who's not a police officer, it should take a warrant for a police officer to engage in it.
The clear intent of the Fourth Amendment is that the police can't pry into our lives without convincing a judge they have probable cause to believe we're involved in a crime. Even then, they can't just fish, they have to tell the judge exactly what crime, why they believe we're involved in it, and what evidence they believe their search will find.
Just because technology may now allow them to do such prying without physically kicking in a door doesn't mean we should allow surveillance on anyone at any time. As far as I'm concerned, gathering data on a specific person's movements, habits, etc., through surveillance, is a type of search (one is checking into that person's personal life, using methods that would routinely be thought to be invasive even if they are in public, and ironically here most of those methods would trigger the very anti-stalking laws being enforced here), and should be subject to Fourth Amendment protection, including the requirement for a warrant.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
No, you can't. There are probably laws out there that prevent you from tampering with police cars. Police officers, in the course of an investigation, are allowed to do things that citizens cannot, such as pulling someone over or patting them down.
The entire problem here is that the state hasn't passed any laws regulating the conduct. The court only ruled that there was no violation of the Fourth Amendment here, which restricts SEARCH and SEIZURE. It would be hard to argue that putting a GPS unit on a car is either a search (you don't see anything in the car, etc.) or a seizure (such as impounding the car). In fact, the decision starts off by inviting the legislature to address the issue. States are allowed to regulate even if there isn't a constitutional bar to an action.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I'm note sure if you meant police (as per GP) or politician, but okay... so far so good, seems to be legal, all that. At least as long as you're a cop.
I'm guessing there's laws against private citizens attaching random item X to other person's property Y.
and there's definitely all sorts of laws against that one.
It's a cute thought-experiment, bound to get you all sorts of populistic "YEA!"-voters, and might even be used to demonstrate the inequality between what some people (such as law enforcement officers, licenses private investigators, licensed bounty hunters, etc.) can do and others (joe schmoe) can't do, but fails to be realistic.
That said - go for it, I'd love to see what happens, the media attention, all that.. I just hope it doesn't end badly for you.
One more thing... is it legal for you to tail a police officer? I guess that would be the deciding factor, because the argument seems to be that a police officer could tail anyone without a warrant, therefore there is no expectation of privacy and using GPS to track the movements is perfectly legal.
So when/if I find such a device on my car it belongs to me doesn't it? And I'm not giving it back. And I'm not paying any bill they send me.
If I find such a device on my car, not only shall I not return it nor pay for it I shall feel free to destroy it, as I did not put it there, and do not want it there.
Police have always been able to 'tail' suspects. I feel this is no different. If police start attaching GPS devices to cars of people not accused of any crimes 'just to see where he goes' and then arresting them for speeding, I'm sure the courts will toss those out using exactly the same type of finding.
You, oddly enough, fail to see the problem differentiating both situations.
The act of tailing a suspect by a police officer requires use of manforce, which prevents it from being widely abused.
Given the constantly decreasing costs of electronics manufacture, even if not now, there will be a point where it becomes possible to constantly monitor large part of the population without extraordinary expenses. Especially if you are doing this to simply gather data on people in case sometimes you decide to go after a particular individual.
I fail to see how this is difficult to envision.
If this is legal for the police, I presume it is legal for anyone else who wishes to track someone. So, with that thought, here is something great for valentine's day: lingerie equipped with GPS tracking. The "boyfriend" version is bound to be more popular because of the strategically placed bulge.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Yeah, it's not like they signed up deliberately for the job and have a will of their own directing their actions, thus making them directly responsible for each and every action they take, like every other human being.
Global warming is a cube.
Or better yet, putting GPS on police cars.
I think a good measure of what a the police can do without a warrant, is what a normal person can do without a warrant. I can't tap the Judges calls, therefore if a cop wants to tap my phone they should need a warrant. If I can't get the GPS logs of the Judges car, then a cop should need a warrant to do the same to me. If this is information our public servants feel we should not have about them, then there *is* an expectation of privacy on that information.
I think enforcement of this type of equality of "public" information will keep Judges and cops in line better in general. Set it into law that as soon as the Police don't need a warrant for some information, we get the information too about them and their families.
Of course in the real world YMMV.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
If the courts claim that GPS tracking doesn't require a warrant, it would be "reasonable" to track every vehicle to improve public safety by automatically enforcing 100% compliance with traffic laws.
Really the decision is bizarre. Are the police allowed to bug your car since you're in public? Is it OK for you to put a GPS tracker on your girlfriend's car?
Stalking is legal now?