Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court To Weigh In On Warrantless GPS Tracking
CWmike writes "In a move with far-reaching privacy implications, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear a case involving the government's authority to conduct prolonged GPS tracking of suspects in criminal cases without first obtaining a court warrant. The government has argued that it has the authority to conduct such searches; privacy advocates have argued that such tracking violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The Supreme Court's decision in the case will be pivotal because lesser courts around the U.S. have appeared split on the issue in recent years, with some upholding warrantless GPS tracking and others rejecting it. Last August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit sided with the subject of the Supreme Court hearing, Antoine Jones, a Washington, D.C. man who was convicted in 2008 on charges of possessing and conspiring to distribute more than 50 kilograms of cocaine, and rejected claims by the government that federal agents have the right to conduct around-the-clock warrantless GPS tracking of suspects."
Yep. What sucks is that they are taking a case where the defendant is clearly someone that the government should have been tracking and just didn't go through the correct channels of authorization (warrants). For the supreme court to decide to hear this case makes me think that they want to look like the good guys when they decide that the government can track anyone for any reason at any time.
Kyllo held that the use of a thermal imaging device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant. Because the police in this case did not have a warrant, the Court reversed Kyllo's conviction for growing marijuana.
Majority: Scalia, joined by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer
Dissent: Stevens, joined by Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy
Kyllo was a win for us, but you can bet Sotamayor and Kagan will follow Stevens lead, and Roberts and Alito will follow Rehnquist/Connor. We get the worst of both the "liberal" and "conservative" Justices.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
Successfully reading the court in advance requires a degree in divining, Harry Potter style. It could be just the opposite -- they want to make the point that it would have been easy to get a warrant, so forbidding warrantless tracking won't actually hurt the state's interest in catching criminals.
"What sucks is that they are taking a case where the defendant is clearly someone that the government should have been tracking and just didn't go through the correct channels of authorization (warrants)."
Do we actually know that? Did they already have probable cause? If they did, why didn't they use it?
I think it's much more likely that they felt they "knew" what he was up to, and were on a fishing expedition to try to get some real evidence. But fishing expeditions are illegal; that's the point.
The problem with just letting them do this to somebody they "know" (or think) is guilty, is that surprisingly often, people "know" things that just aren't so. Further, as the Supreme Court has ruled in the past, fishing expeditions are not permissible because, among other reasons, "evidence" might be found that makes even innocent people appear guilty. Just like the guy who was picked up for arson because his local store's "club card" information said he had bought a fire starter. Later, the real guilty party confessed to the crime. The other guy just wanted to light his barbecue.
Oh fuck you.
Clarence "Just Bribe My Wife" Thomas's points were as disgustingly intellectually dishonest as I've ever seen from him.
Parental responsibility is just that: PARENTAL. It doesn't mean kids need to have a signed fucking permission slip to go into a store to buy a comic book, bubble gum, or even a video game. It means it is the responsibility of the PARENT to manage what money their kids are given, what they are allowed to do with it, and to punish the kid appropriately when the kid decides to "go behind their parents' backs and..."
If you as a parent don't want your kid to buy a certain game, or a certain action figure, or a toy cap gun, or a certain book, or a magazine, or any one of a gazillion other things that uptight cult-brainwashed puritan moron parents seem to think are "bad" for their kids, then YOU TALK TO YOUR KID ABOUT IT. It is the responsibility of the PARENT to keep tabs on what their kid is doing/buying.
The ruling, rightly stated, points out that it is NOT the right of the parent to demand that every fucking shopkeeper in the state has to be a fucking prick about selling harmless things and checking ID merely because of the 1 in a million chance that the parents of the kid in front of him might be the sort of fucking gap-toothed asshole who insists that the only books in the house be "Da Bible" and the gun cleaning manual hanging next to the rack of roadkill waiting to be gutted and spit-roasted for dinner.
If it were up to this court the government would be able to quarter troops in our homes.
You should be HONORED to have one of our brave troops set foot in your home, you dope-smoking Liberal. If it wasn't for our troops, you wouldn't have a home, you Sharia-loving socialist! You should take a trip down to the local VA hospital to get a close look at the blood and limbs that have been lost to save your freedom. My wife and I moved into the garage so the fine young hero in our care could sleep in a decent bed after the rock mattresses he got in Afghanistan.
Sure, they were good enough to fight for you in Iraq, but now you think our troops should be homeless. You make me sick, you Jon Stewart acolyte.
[I defy you to work through Poe's Law on this one. :-) ]
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Decaff, bro.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
SuperDave80 could have made his argument with a little more rigor, but what's he reaching for is "Not even the King is above the Law."
The Government cannot expect us to follow the Law if it will not follow the Law itself. This was the whole point of the Magna Carta, one of the founding documents of modern law.
The 1215 Charter required King John of England to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not arbitrary, for example by explicitly accepting that no "freeman" (in the sense of non-serf) could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.
If the Rule of Law does not apply to all, including and especially the Executive, then you have the walking definition of a corrupt state and an illegitimate government. When the government does not obey the law, you have a duty to break it and oppose the men in power. I'll let the Declaration of Independence speak for itself:
...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends ... it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
When the government does not follow the Law, then there is no Law to be followed.
You will, of course, still have moral limits on your behavior.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The cops can already get this information by dangerously and expensively tailing you or flying over your head, and they can do that without a warrant; why should obtaining the same information from a GPS be any different?
Because the burden of cost is one of the ways that our public anonymity is maintained. If the cost barrier is removed, it will need to be erected as a legal barrier.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The cops can already get this information by dangerously and expensively tailing you or flying over your head, and they can do that without a warrant; why should obtaining the same information from a GPS be any different?
Because Liberty is a matter of degree, not just type. A woman runs into her ex-boyfriend at Starbucks Monday morning. If she doesn't see him again, that's chance. If she bumps into him again at lunch, that's odd. If she sees him at dinner, it's weird. If she sees him every time she sets foot out her door, that's stalking.
Police departments have finite resources. They can only surveil a handful of people full-time. That's police work. If they can automate that and keep track of thousands of people simultaneously while logging their every movement into a database, that's Orwellian.
The fact that they would do that while trespassing on my property is just creepy.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States are tenured; they don't care if they look like 'the good guys' or not. They don't have to compete with anyone else to keep their jobs for the rest of their useful lives, so there's simply no impetus to keep other people happy.
This is a good thing: It is, perhaps, the least political position of power in the justice system.
I look forward to seeing what they have to say about this case.
Kid-proof tablet..
No, but the police will put a gun to your head while they destroy your phone if you take a photo.
"But it would not be illegal for an undercover officer to follow him around, the police doesn't need probable cause for that. At least I've never heard of the police being charged with stalking and given a restraining order..."
But, as his defense attorney has already pointed out, that is different. Even a dedicated human "tail" is not likely to be following him 24 hours a day, everywhere he goes. There are some definite differences there.
It also involves tampering with private property, to attach and detach the device.
What it boils down to, is that this is somewhere between human surveillance, as you compared it to, and putting a radio collar on you to track your every movement. I think it is pretty obvious that a radio collar would come under the purview of the 4th Amendment.
And if you ask my honest opinion, that situation resembles a radio collar a hell of a lot more than it does human surveillance.