Supreme Court Backs Privacy Rights in GPS Case

(The Wall Street Journal) - The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect's vehicle, voting unanimously in one of the first major cases to test constitutional privacy rights in the digital age.

The government argued that attaching the tiny device to a car's undercarriage was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.

Thus, the technique was "reasonable," meaning that police were free to employ it for any reason without first justifying it to a magistrate, the government said.

The justices seemed troubled by that position at arguments in November, where the government acknowledged it would also allow attaching such trackers to the justices' own cars without obtaining a warrant.

The court split 5-4 over the reasoning behind Monday's decision, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority that as conceived in the 18th century, the Fourth Amendment's protection of "persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" would extend to private property such as an automobile.

Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined the Scalia opinion.

In a surprising departure, Justice Samuel Alito split from fellow conservatives. He held that the search violated not merely property rights, but an individual's "reasonable expectation of privacy" -- the test the court has used since 1967, when it held that warrants were required before police could wiretap a call made from a public telephone booth because "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Justice Alito's concurring opinion.

Justice Alito warned that a property-based approach was too narrow to guard against the proliferating threats to personal privacy modern technology posed.

Justice Scalia stressed, however, that the majority was not repudiating the broader test articulated in 1967, but rather that it was unnecessary to reach it because installation of the tracker was sufficient by itself to trigger the Fourth Amendment.

The decision upholds a federal appeals court in Washington, which voided a drug conviction because police obtained evidence by using the GPS tracker to follow the suspect's movements without a valid warrant.

In fact, police had obtained a warrant to attach the tracker within the District of Columbia, but installed the device after the warrant expired and while the car was parked in Maryland. It was unclear why police did not seek to renew the warrant after it expired, or obtain one valid in Maryland.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal