Court: Police GPS Spying A-OK

In a not-entirely-surprising decision, by the 7th Circuit, they ruled that coppers can attach a surreptitious GPS tracking device to your car. Warning, the following mini-dissertation on police powers would be more convincing if I could find one specific case.

So the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right of people "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable search and seizure," was applied to the states through something called incorporation. What you really need to care about is that what the supreme court says about unreasonable searches goes for the states too. So the first case pretty much anyone talks about when they talk about technology assisted searches is a case called Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). It extended to people's rights of privacy to wiretaps. In this case police put a listening device on the outside of a phone booth Katz was known to use, and overheard his conversations.

The next case to which we turn is Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001). In this case the court (led, surprisingly, by Antonin Scalia) said that the police could not use thermal imaging to gain information on someone's property. They suspected the residents of the house to be growing marijuana, so they they pointed an thermal camera at the house, and measured the temperature of the walls compared to those of neighboring houses. Then, using that data and utility bills, as well as some informants, they got a search warrant and found the pot in the house. The court didn't buy the dissent's, and defendant's, argument that there should be a distinction between things that come off walls and things that come through them. No one would argue that setting up a large X-Ray machine to see through the house without ever going on the property would be a search, but what if they are only getting heat off the walls? The majority said that this would overturn Katz, as in Katz the police placed a listening device on the outside of a phone-booth, getting vibrations through the glass. Ignoring the physical invasion in Katz, they have a good argument. More to the core of the majorities argument is that while in similar cases people had been convicted by luck, after a police man pointed a flashlight at them, revealing their nighttime maliciousness, in this case the police had to use specialized equipment, the kind not readily available to the public.

Compare with the case that I cannot for the life of me find. In this case the court said that attaching a tracking device to a package and watching the package be put into defendants car, then tracking the package and car, was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Why? Well it would be silly to prevent the police from using the crime-fighting devices to which they have access. No, I have not figured out a reasonable way to reconcile this with the previous case, except that the previous case doesn't involve cars: a larger distinction than you'd think.

That's why it comes as no surprise the court would allow the police to use a readily available, even to the general public, method of tracking a car under suspicion.

UPDATE: So the case I couldn't find last night us Unites States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276. In it the defendant took some chloroform that had a tracking device in it and the police tracked the chloroform. The Supreme Court also doesn't know what the difference is between a precursor and a solvent, when it comes to making meth, but that's beside the point. The GPS decision, which cites Knotts, is U.S. v. Garcia, and was written by none other than Judge Posner.