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SALT LAKE CITY -- How far can police go in tracking your movements without a warrant? That's the key issue as the Supreme Court weighs a case involving the use of GPS monitoring on suspect cars.
A justice department lawyer is arguing GPS tracking is highly effective during early investigations, and sticking a GPS tracker on a car is one of a number of tools police use without a warrant.
Others include sifting through garbage and flat-out following somebody.
The contentious issue centers around what is public and private. No search warrant is needed for GPS monitoring, because there's nothing private about driving along a public street.
But defense attorneys are mounting a vigorous case against warrant-less GPS monitoring. They're coming from a position of strength in this legal challenge. A lower-court ruling threw out a drug conviction against their client in which a GPS tracking device was used on a car without a warrant.
In 2005, Police in Washington D.C. secretly hooked a device on to Antoine Jones car to track is movements for a month and used the information to convict him of dealing cocaine. Jones' attorney argued before the court that police who want to use GPS to track a suspect should first obtain a warrant.
"One of the justices said, 'You really mean you could have law enforcement simply decide they want to track all nine members of this court, all nine justices to find out where we go in our cars,'" said Defense Attorney Walter Dellinger.
The government lawyer responded "Yes," which drew concern from all nine justices.
Justice Stephen Breyer even considered it Orwellian, comparing it to the novel "1984" and tactics in a "Big Brother" police state. These kinds of cases aren't common, but they do happen. In March, an Egyptian-American college student filed a lawsuit against the FBI for doing the same thing. A mechanic found the device during an oil change and the student took pictures and posted them online.
A few days later, agents showed up at his door and asked to get the GPS device back. The Supreme Court is expected to rule sometime before next June whether a warrant is in fact needed for this kind of monitoring.
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