In a crucial victory for civil liberties, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police in Washington, D.C., violated the Fourth Amendment when they attached a GPS tracking device to a suspect's vehicle without a valid warrant.
The unanimous ruling in United States v. Jones will have important repercussions in Connecticut and across the country. The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut has already challenged the closely related practice of GPS cellphone tracking and has issued a series of Freedom of Information requests to assess how police in the state are using it.
"This opinion reconfirms the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure at a time when it has been increasingly threatened by technological change," said Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut. "It's a powerful reminder that without probable cause and a warrant, the government has no right to invade the privacy of its citizens."
Washington, D.C., police placed the GPS device on Antoine Jones' vehicle without a valid warrant and tracked its movements for 28 days.
The ruling, while providing welcome reinforcement to constitutional protections, leaves some important questions about digital privacy unanswered, particularly those raised about cellphone tracking. The majority opinion is based largely on the physical intrusion of placing the GPS device on the vehicle but doesn't address the constitutional questions that arise when information is gathered by other means.
"It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion.
"We're encouraged that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its first look at this technology, has recognized the intrusive nature of GPS tracking," said David McGuire, staff attorney for the ACLU of Connecticut. "As technology advances, the courts will continue to grapple with these issues. The fight for digital privacy has only just begun.
Read the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Jones.
