On Monday the Supreme Court Ruled, unanimously to restricted law enforcement’s use of use GPS device’s to track suspects. A warrant must first be obtained to use this method of survelliance. This being the first test of privacy rights in the digital age.
It’s ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration, which had argued that a warrant was not required to use global positioning system devices to monitor a vehicle on public streets.
The court’s view, was that long-term surveillance of a suspect by GPS tracking IS different than traditional, low-tech forms of monitoring and should require a warrant in doing so.
Without dissent the Court, agreed that prosecutors violated Antoine Jones’s rights when they attached a GPS device to his Jeep. Monitoring his movements for 28 days. The case was one of the Washington D.C. area’s highest profile drug trials, and the nightclub owner was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The Supreme Court case is United States v. Antoine Jones, No. 10-1259.
In his analysis of the court’s ruling, Joel Reidenberg a law professor at Fordham University in New York state, “This is an indication that there are justices who are recognizing that privacy norms are shifting but the fact that people’s lives take place increasingly online does not mean that society has decided that there’s no such thing as privacy anymore.”
This ruling is seen as a win for folks in the battle for Privacy and could overturn several cases where law enforcement has placed trackers on citizens vehicles illegally as of late.
Source: WashingtonPost, Reuters,