Massachusetts Police Can't Place GPS On Autos Without Warrant

pickens writes "The EFF reports that the Supreme Court of Massachusetts has held in Commonwealth v. Connolly that police may not place GPS tracking devices on cars without first getting a warrant, reasoning that the installation of the GPS device was a seizure of the suspect's vehicle. Search and seizure is a legal procedure used in many civil law and common law legal systems whereby police or other authorities and their agents, who suspect that a crime has been committed, do a search of a person's property and confiscate any relevant evidence to the crime. According to the decision, 'when an electronic surveillance device is installed in a motor vehicle, be it a beeper, radio transmitter, or GPS device, the government's control and use of the defendant's vehicle to track its movements interferes with the defendant's interest in the vehicle notwithstanding that he maintains possession of it.' Although the case only protects drivers in Massachusetts, another recent state court case, People v. Weaver in the State of New York, also held that because modern GPS devices are far more powerful than beepers, police must get a warrant to use the trackers, even on cars and people traveling the public roads."

Comments

Re:What is very sad

[bkpark]

is that there had to be a case where the Police overstepped their authority, and did this without a warrant, before this question of law could be settled.

That's a definite flaw in our legal system: someone has to be abused (at least) once before the courts can rule.

Um, no. That's the flaw in the common law system, but that flaw exists by definition, since the judges cannot rule on cases that have not been brought before them.

In America, though, nothing stopped the state legislators from passing a law explicitly saying that police may not surreptitiously place a tracker on a car before getting a warrant. They could have done that long before any police officer got it in their head to overstep their boundary.

But of course, they were---especially in Massachusetts---too busy taxing and spending their constituent's money to devote any time to protecting their fundamental rights. But make no mistake. It is not the system that has failed, it's the legislators that the people of Massachusetts elected that have failed.

Sadness

[schne324]

As mentioned by others, the Patriot Act gives the government the right to use the appropriate tools for intercepting and obstructing terrorism. This has nothing to do with most of these cases in which members of the police force unlawfully place a tracking device on a car. What's next, me waking up with a tracking device implanted into by body? This is just one of the numerous occasions in which the police think they're above the law, and can get away with anything. It frightens me that we (the public) only find out about a small percentage of their wrong doings.