Court asked to balance information age advances with constitutional protections - The Washington Post

Now this is a tough one folks, This involves a case where the law placed a GPS device on a suspect's car and tracked him for a month, eventually gathering enough evidence to convict him.

The US Court of appeals overturned his conviction, even though the Supreme Court has already ruled that a person has no expectation of privacy in public. The appeals court ruled that the police must obtain a warrant before placing such a device on someone's vehicle. Other appeals courts have ruled that the law does not need such a warrant. Solicitor General Neal Katyal is appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court.

While the court ruled that the 28-day tracking of Jones’s every movement in his Jeep was too much, saying “the whole of a person’s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood a stranger would observe all those movements . . . is essentially nil.”, I believe that the issue is not whether the police can track someone, as they can the old fashioned way, but whether they can legally "enter" a person's domain (car) and place a device without their permit. Courts have already ruled that a person's vehicle is just as much their domain as their home is, the police cannot search their car without their permission, or a warrant. The outside of a vehicle should be as protected as the inside, a vandal spray painting a fender is just as guilty of damaging property as the one spray painting the seats.

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Court asked to balance information age advances with constitutional protections - The Washington Post

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