From the Dish: Digital Stakeouts Are Dirt Cheap

Andrew Sullivan points out that technology is making surveillance cheaper and easier - which raises the appropriate civil liberties concerns.

- Click here for the story.

If unreasonable searches are easier to do, one assumes they will be done.

A related story: It Costs the Government Just 6.5 Cents an Hour to Spy on You

In United States v. Jones, five Supreme Court justices held that a man’s reasonable expectation of privacy was breached after police tracked his movements on public roads for 28 days using a GPS device. The majority in the 2012 opinion, however, stopped short of articulating a clear rule other than Justice Alito’s finding that “the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark.”

Using the Jones ruling as a baseline, Bankston and Soltani calculated and compared the costs of different location tracking methods used by police. Traditional surveillance methods like covert foot and car pursuits cost $250 and $275, respectively, per hour per target, according to their estimates. Another common method, which the Supreme Court has approved, involves two agents tracking a suspect’s movements from their police vehicle through a radio-based transmitter affixed to a target’s car or slipped in his bag at a cost of $105 to $113 per hour.
Newer surveillance technologies were significantly cheaper, they found. The total price tag of tracking a suspect using a GPS device, similar to the one in Jones, for instance, came out to $10 an hour over one day, $1.43 per hour over a week and $0.36 per hour over a month. Another relatively new technique, obtaining a suspect’s location through his or her cellphone signal with the carrier’s assistance, yielded similar results. As of August 2009, fees for obtaining cellphone location data from carriers ranged from $0.04 to $4.17 per hour for one month of surveillance. After tabulating their results, Bankston and Soltani concluded that the total cost of using a GPS device to track a suspect over 28 days (the method rejected in Jones) was roughly 300 times less expensive than the same tracking using a transmitter (technology approved by the Supreme Court) and 775 times less expensive than using the five-car pursuit method (also approved). Meanwhile, the cost of using transmitter-surveillance technology was only 2.5 times less expensive than undercover car pursuit.

As data mining, wiretaps and domestic drones become the new norm for police departments at a cost of a few cents a day, we need to have a frank discussion about where our Fourth Amendment protections are heading. In advocating their cost-based approach for determining the legality of different surveillance technologies, the researchers say they do not “equate police efficiency with unconstitutionality” but rather attempt to preserve the degree of privacy that existed in the Framers’ era. As Justice Alito quipped in Jones, we must remember that absent “a very tiny constable … with [the] incredible fortitude and patience” hiding out in the trunk of a carriage, it would have been impossible for George Washington’s colonial law enforcement authorities to have carried out anything near the level of surveillance that today’s police forces can do at the drop of a dime.

ScotusBlog: US v. Jones.