Supreme Court rules warrant needed for GPS tracking

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
Updated 2h ago

WASHINGTON – In its first ever review of GPS tracking, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that police need a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a person's car.

The opinion was unanimous, although the justices split in their views of how the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to such high-tech tracking.

The case, which during November oral arguments had prompted justices' references to George Orwell's futuristic novel 1984 and to "Big Brother" government, ensures that police cannot use GPS to continuously track a suspect before presenting grounds and obtaining a warrant from a judge.

The court reversed the cocaine-trafficking conviction of a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner. In 2005, police secretly attached a GPS device to a Jeep owned by Antoine Jones while it was parked in a public lot. Agents then used evidence of Jones' travels over four weeks to help win the conviction on conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Civil libertarians and defense lawyers praised the ruling in United States v. Jones. "We welcome the Supreme Court's recognition that the Fourth Amendment must continue to protect against government intrusions even in the face of modern technological surveillance tools," said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which was among the groups that submitted a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of Jones.

The Justice Department, which had appealed a lower court decision requiring a warrant for GPS tracking, had no immediate response, said spokeswoman Tracy Schamler.

Monday's ruling applies directly to tracking devices that police install on a person's car or other property. But five of the justices suggested in concurring statements that a warrant might similarly be required for high-tech tracking done through cellphones or other devices already equipped with GPS.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the main opinion for the court, read portions of his opinion from the bench Monday: "The government's physical intrusion on the Jeep for the purpose of obtaining information constitutes a search."

He based his decision on the roots of the Fourth Amendment and wrote, "Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred." He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

The four other justices, led by Samuel Alito, concurred only in the judgment for Jones. Alito said the case would be better analyzed by asking whether Jones' "reasonable expectations of privacy were violated by the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle he drove."

Alito contended the attachment of the GPS device was not itself an illegal "search." Rather, he argued, what matters is a driver's expectation of privacy.

"We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark," Alito wrote, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Sotomayor, who fully joined Scalia's opinion, suggested in a separate concurring statement that she agreed with parts of Alito's analysis, which would cover privacy expectations not only when police affix a device but when there's no physical invasion. That could cover when police access signals from a GPS-enabled smartphone.

The Justice Department had argued that drivers do not expect their movements on public streets to be kept private, no matter the duration, so GPS tracking should not fall under the Fourth Amendment protections regarding searches and seizures.

The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally developed for the military but now ubiquitous among travelers, relies on satellites that transmit receivers to the ground.

A GPS device installed by police can be used to follow a person 24 hours a day, for long periods of time. Data can be collected and analyzed far more efficiently and economically than having large teams of agents follow a person.

When the case was argued, Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben insisted that the government was not trying to obtain "24-hour surveillance of every citizen of the United States." This case, he said, "involves following one suspected drug dealer as to whom there was a very strong suspicion."

Supreme Court rules warrant needed for GPS tracking