The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in November in the case of United States vs. Jones, concerning the right to privacy and limits on governmental surveillance in public.
The case deals with police in Washington D.C. who placed a GPS device on the car of a suspected drug dealer without a valid warrant. Through use of the GPS, police tracked the suspect’s movements for close to a month and used the information gained from it to charge and convict him with conspiracy to sell cocaine.
What the court must now determine is whether the use of the GPS violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure of persons, houses, papers and effects.
Without a doubt, the police should have obtained a warrant before tampering with the suspect’s car. Appellate courts in previous cases similar to this have upheld the use of GPS devices sans warrant on the grounds that citizens have no right or expectation to privacy in public places, and that surveillance technology like GPS devices only make public surveillance more effective. However, the suspect’s car should not be considered a public place; it is his own private property and therefore such surveillance should require a warrant.
GPS devices and other forms of surveillance technology are not the problem in this case. What makes this unacceptable is the violation of privacy without due cause and process. In the digital age in which we live, it can only be expected that law enforcement will take advantage of the technology available to them to do their job.
That being said, police and law enforcement should not use expensive, questionably invasive surveillance technology where good old-fashioned human surveillance would do. After tracking the suspect’s every movement for a month, they still only managed to convict him of conspiracy to sell as opposed to actual possession and sale. Why couldn’t they obtain the information they needed for the conviction by physically following the suspect? Such action would not require a warrant nor would it constitute a grey area in privacy rights.
Surveillance technology should not be limited in its availability and use; it will only keep the American people safer. However, use of the technology without a warrant is unconscionable and unconstitutional within the realm of someone’s private property.
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