It has come up in many a court whether or not tracking a suspect with a GPS tracker is legal. Is it a breach of the fourth amendment? Is a tracker a form of “unreasonable searches”? Need it be dependent on a warrant “upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation”? Is it in violation of the clause “describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”, because you can’t exactly specify where you will search someone if you are tracking them? All words in quotations come directly from the Constitution, the legal body that almost 350 years after composition our nation still follows.
If the words are taken literally, then it would be almost impossible to use a GPS-enabled tracker to assist in the capturing of a suspected criminal. A tracker in any shape or form would qualify as an unreasonable search by most legal definitions. Any covert tracking generally requires special permission by a legal enforcement authoritative figure. The thing is, issuing a warrant for a GPS tracker would be problematic. There’s almost no way to describe what’s going to be tracked and where, and the whole point of the warrant is that it must be as specific as possible to ensure a legal search.
The dilemma has been brought to court before by suspects that felt that they were violated. They appealed their cases to some of the country’s thirteen federal Court of Appeals. The 7th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of a criminal found guilty on proof that was documented by a GPS tracker. The defendant claimed that such surreptitious tracking was an “unreasonable search”. The courts ruled that placing a tracking device on a car does not qualify as a “search or seizure” because they equated the device to a police car physically tailing the vehicle. The judge reasoned, “if police follow a car around, or observe its route by means of cameras mounted on lampposts or by satellite imaging as in Google Earth, there is no search”. From that ruling, issuing a warrant wouldn’t be necessary.
There was a difference of opinion between the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals to that of the D.C. Circuit. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote a 41 page opinion as to why he and his two fellow judges chose the verdict that favored privacy. “It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even to follow someone during a single journey as he goes to the market or returns home from work,” Ginsburg wrote. “It is another thing entirely for that stranger to pick up the scent again the next day and the day after that, week in and week out, dogging his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.” He felt that GPS tracking was equivalent to the kind of police tracking that requires a warrant.
There’s only one court above the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court. Being as that there is no official verdict yet, it is entirely up to the national court to announce a verdict to apply in all 50 states. It will be interesting to learn the conclusion when the next historic decision is announced.
Tagged as:
Covert Tracking,
global positioning system,
Google Earth,
gps,
GPS Tracker,
GPS Tracking,
law enforcement,
satellite imagery,
triangulate,
Warrant
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