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The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
[Quote]:
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.
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Is it that much different from just following you in a car? Seriously, I’m more concerned with them following where my computer goes.
Is it that much different from just following you in a car?
Actually it is – for several reasons, but I’ll give you just one example right now: you won’t see them doing this people rich enough to afford a gate around their house, or afford a closed garage.
I find it troubling to try to dismiss this on an Equal Protection argument rather than a more fundamental Right to Privacy argument. The distinction being made is not whether you can reasonably expect to be free from tracking while driving but rather whether you can expect your car to not be tampered with when parked on your property. It’s the former that’s important.
With regard to whether GPS-based tracking is the same as following someone using manpower, I think the argument here is more analogous to the public availability of phone listings. When listings were only available in phone books, it was effectively intractable to ask “who has phone number 1234567?” or “who lives at address X?” and answer it using the phone listings. When the listings were digitized, suddenly those questions became trivial to answer, and issues about their usage ensued. Ditto for robo-calling. Should robo-calling be legal simply because one could theoretically do it by hand?