Court will decide if police need warrant for GPS 'tracking'

[Jack Reed]

At 12:12 PM 5/12/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>I read somewhere that the original wiretap laws were motivated when
>police
>bugged a phone booth (fishing), and snared someone placing a bet.  The
>court
>held that there was an expectation of privacy.

The original laws and cases concerning wiretapping predate the case your 
talking about by quite a bit. California's law concerning intercepting 
telegraph communications, passed in 1862, made wiretapping illegal before 
the advent of the telephone. The first Supreme Court case dealing 
explicitly with wiretapping is Olmstead v. U.S. (1928) where the Court 
decided that wiretapping was not a trespass. (The reasons for this are to 
convoluted to go into here.) This precedent held until the late 60's when 
the Warren Court made two decisions that forced the Feds to implement an 
actual law that dealt with wiretapping.  The case you're talking about is 
Katz V. U.S. (1967) where the FBI put a tap on a phone booth without 
obtaining a court order.  This precedent was important because it held that 
the Fourth Amendment protected people, rather than places, and that 
wherever someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as in a 
closed phone booth, is protected.


>Interesting to see what
>they say now.  Segues nicely with the CALEA/cellphone locator tech too.
The Court decided on essentially the same facts in U.S. v. Knotts when they 
held that placing a beeper in a drum containing chloroform used in the 
manufacture of illegal drugs was constitutional because it only extended 
the legal practice of physically following someone.  I doubt that the 
Rehnquist court is going to overturn that precedent. There was a case 
decided in 2001 which held that using a thermal imaging device to detect 
patterns of heat consistent with growing marijuana indoors was a search and 
needed a warrant. They do have some qualms about the cops using technology 
that's not available to the general public but I doubt they'll come up in 
this case.

The cell phone locator is getting shoved through the back door in the E911 
specs to save those people who get stranded in the East River while their 
drunk or drive off a cliff.  It's all for the good of the people of course.

   Jack Reed



>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/121572_gps12.html
>
>                Monday, May 12, 2003
>
>                 Court will decide if police need warrant for GPS
>'tracking'
>
>                 By KATHY GEORGE
>                 SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
>
>                 William Bradley Jackson worried that he hadn't properly
>concealed his victim's
>                 shallow grave. So he snuck away one quiet fall day to
>finish the job, unaware
>                 that sheriff's deputies had secretly attached a
>satellite tracking device to his
>                 truck.
>
>                 Police trickery triumphed over his treachery.
>
>                 Spokane County sheriff's investigators used the hidden
>                 device to retrace Jackson's path to the gravesite, where
>they
>                 found crucial evidence that would lead to his murder
>                 conviction in 2000.
>
>                 But what if the same secret technology, called global
>                 positioning satellite tracking, could track anyone at
>any
>                 time?
>
>                 The Washington Supreme Court will decide soon whether
>police agencies
>                 throughout the state may use the device freely --
>without a warrant. The
>                 Jackson case is the first in the state dealing with the
>issue.
>
>                 "Do we really want the ability to track everybody all
>the time, without any
>                 suspicion, or without probable cause?" asked Doug
>Klunder, a Seattle
>                 attorney who wrote an amicus brief, or friend of the
>court, in the case on
>                 behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of
>Washington. "How close are
>                 we to Big Brother?"
>
>                 Many law enforcement agencies, including the King County
>Sheriff's Office
>                 and King County Prosecutor's Office, believe no warrant
>is needed for the
>                 tracking devices.
>
>                 That's because they simply record electronically what
>anyone could see by
>                 following a vehicle on the public streets.
>
>                 "We'd be shocked if the court said otherwise," said King
>County sheriff's
>                 spokesman Kevin Fagerstrom.
>
>                 In Jackson's case, the state Court of Appeals in Spokane
>agreed no warrant
>                 was needed.
>
>                 The court's opinion last year said, "A law officer could
>legally follow Mr.
>                 Jackson's vehicles on public thoroughfares .... The GPS
>devices made Mr.
>                 Jackson's vehicles visible or identifiable as though the
>officers had merely
>                 cleaned his license plates, or unobtrusively marked his
>vehicles and made them
>                 plain to see."
>
>                 Critics of the Spokane court's opinion say there's a big
>difference between
>                 following someone's real-time movements and recording
>them for computer
>                 analysis later. "There's just something that feels more
>underhanded about it,"
>                 said Klunder.
>
>                 It's not just government abuse the ACLU fears. Stalkers
>could use GPS to
>                 find their victims, and jealous husbands could use it to
>spy on their wives. "If
>                 the police can do it without a warrant, then presumably
>a private citizen can,
>                 too," Klunder said.
><snip>