September 13, 2011
In
Blog, Fourth Amendment, Privacy, United States Supreme Court
Big Brother is watching you…
The New York Times reports that judges in several states have been citing George Orwell’s 1984 to sound an alarm. In November, the Supreme Court will hear United States v. Jones, “the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade.”
The Court will address whether police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time. While a unanimous decision in the D.C. Circuit found this use of technology for government surveillance to be unconstitutional, federal appeals courts in Chicago and San Francisco have previously allowed police to use GPS tracking devices without a warrant.
