GPS tracking: Supreme Court must protect Americans from Orwellian control

This term the Supreme Court will decide whether the warrantless GPS monitoring of an individual?s car violates the Fourth Amendment.?The court?s answer must be a resounding yes.

The specter of an Orwellian world in which Americans? every movement is monitored is no longer a chimera. It is upon us.

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This term the Supreme Court will decide whether the warrantless GPS monitoring of an individual?s car violates the Fourth Amendment. The court?s answer must be a resounding yes.

The Fourth Amendment generally requires officers to obtain a search warrant from a judge prior to performing an invasive search or seizure. The threshold for a warrant is minimal: Officers must show probable cause, defined as a reasonable belief, that a crime was committed. This mandate protects individuals from over-zealous officers and provides officers with an objective perspective on the efficacy of their investigations.

A GPS tracking device should only be employed after probable cause is established and a warrant secured. The government contends that Americans forfeit their privacy whenever they enter the public domain and that GPS technology can be used before probable cause is established. However, this?would allow individuals to be targeted without any established factual cause, obliterating longstanding notions of privacy that Americans regard as sacrosanct.

Absent the requirement of a warrant, a single officer could surreptitiously affix a GPS device to an individual?s car and observe its movements for weeks or months on end. Activities once thought private ? health choices, religious affiliations, political associations, romantic liaisons ? would become a matter of public concern, traceable by police.

Worse, unchecked GPS surveillance may chill such activities. Freedom sometimes presupposes anonymity. Indeed an individual contemplating a trip to the abortion clinic, treatment at a drug rehabilitation center, or membership in an unpopular political or religious group, may reconsider if that person believes the government could be watching.

That people use public roads, or otherwise enter the public realm, to participate in the political and cultural fabric of society does not mean that they surrender their expectation of privacy. People having to search their vehicles for a tracking device every time they get behind the wheel is antithetical to a democracy committed to protecting individual rights. As Justice Louis Brandeis once famously noted, ?the right to be let alone [is] the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/CVw8RCNm3bs/GPS-tracking-Supreme-Court-must-protect-Americans-from-Orwellian-control

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