Senator Introduces Bill To Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking

bs0d3 writes "Right now the police and FBI are able to use GPS tracking devices, stingrays, and other tracking technologies without a warrant. They can read your personal emails without a warrant, they can recall your phone call history, all without a warrant. These are clear violations of the fourth amendment, but time and time again the courts are ruling that the fourth amendment doesn't protect people who use modern technology. This week Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Kirk (R-IL), and Jason Chaffetz (D-UT) announced a bill with bipartisan support called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act. It provides sorely needed legal clarity for the use of electronically-obtained location data that can be used to track and log the location and movements of individual Americans. The G.P.S. Act is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Constitution Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The full text of the bill can be read online."

Comments

Re:Ron Wyden is always involved in these things

[DanTheStone]

Best comment I've seen about him yet (from an anonymous commenter on another site):

"I'd like to order a couple of Wydens for my state, is Oregon going to be making any more or do you guys want the monopoly on politicians with heads outside their asses?"

Re:Ron Wyden is always involved in these things

[mykos]

I would vote for a hundred senators who run mudslinging campaigns but still do their jobs well than to continually elect citizen haters who blow rainbows up my ass every six years.

Re:So instead of using a GPS system...

[borcharc]

They will just hire a bunch of agents to tail people they want to tail. Costing millions of dollars in vehicles, fuel, payroll and benefits.

Thats the idea. If they want to do surveillance on you, they actually have to do it. It is not supposed to be easy or cheep for the government to make its case. This makes the government put their attention on the cases that matter.

It's not a huge stretch

[sirwired]

Firstly, the position of your vehicle on public roads is not now, and never has been, subject to constitutional protections. Those public roads are public property, and any member of the public, or the state itself, can record data about what vehicles are traveling which roads when. (Just like you can collect data on public airspace usage... there are exhaustive databases that have years of flight tracking for every plane in the US that flew under a flight plan.) That data can be bought, sold, transferred, analyzed, reported on, used in lawsuits or criminal cases, etc. with no restrictions of any kind. This part of the law isn't the least bit vague. A little creepy, yes, but not legally questionable. The only legal questions are on the collection methods, not the data itself.

The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous? Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act... an officer can frisk you and your clothing (property) without a warrant during an arrest, but he can't toss your car (another form of property.)

An officer can, under current constitutional law, place a chalk mark on your tire to track how long it has been parked by the roadside. What are the legally significant distinctions between that and a GPS tracker in your tire well? Is that distinction enough to make the device "unreasonable"? There certainly are distinctions between the two, but where is the line of "reasonable" search without a warrant crossed?

We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient? The two standards to choose from would be Reasonable Suspicion (no warrant needed) vs. Probable Cause (intrusive enough to make a warrant necessary.)

This is not contorted logic here... it's a legitimate legal question where different judges have interpreted the relevant precedent differently. And it's not one I know the answer to.

Re:It's not a huge stretch

[JesseMcDonald]

The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous?

Can they attach such a device to you, or your clothing? Why should your car be any different?

Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act...

What you mean, of course, is that in the interest of "efficient" law enforcement they get as close to the line as they can possibly get, and frequently cross over it only to be forgiven by courts which are ultimately part of the same organization and biased toward their side.

We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient?

There's only one constitutional standard: Probable Cause. "Reasonable" is something you establish by getting a warrant. If you haven't been issued a warrant then you haven't established that the search is reasonable. More to the point, authorization to perform a search or seizure is a warrant, and a declaration that an entire class of searches or seizures is authorized as "reasonable" without reference to specific persons or property and probably cause is strictly in violation of the second half of the 4th Amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Re:A Clear Violation of the 4th Amendment?

[gstrickler]

Which part of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." is unclear? Searching your cell phone without a warrant is a blatantly clear violation.