Saturday, September 4, 2010

GPS and the Right to Privacy

From Time Magazine:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

This fits both 2301 and 2302. What is the extent of privacy and our security against unreasonable searches and seizures? What make a search unreasonable anyway? And how might the current Supreme Court decide these questions? This also makes clear the degree to which our understanding of the Constitution is impacted by improvements in technology.