Supreme Court expresses doubts about police GPS use

WASHINGTON -- Police use of GPS tracking clearly makes Supreme Court justices nervous — as the many scenarios they posed Tuesday showed.

"You could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month, no problem under the Constitution?" Chief Justice John Roberts asked doubtfully.

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, defending Global Positioning System surveillance, said yes, if federal agents wanted to track the nine justices on public streets, agents could do so without a warrant.

Could agents monitor people through cellphones that "emit signals that police can pick up and use to follow someone, anywhere?" Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked.

Not if they go into private residences, Dreeben said, only in public places.

As the Supreme Court took its first-ever look at GPS tracking Tuesday, the justices raised plenty of daunting situations involving high-tech surveillance. Yet there was no clear consensus for a rule that would govern such cases, including the one before them involving the attachment of a GPS device to a car.

The Global Positioning System relies on a constellation of satellites that transmit signals to receivers on the ground. It can be used to follow a person 24 hours a day, weeks on end, in a way that would be extremely costly and nearly impossible with usual police manpower.

Such pervasive satellite tracking of a driver's every move prompted several references Tuesday to George Orwell's futurist novel 1984 and to "Big Brother" government. It also raised questions of how people's expectations of privacy may be changing in contemporary America.

Justice Samuel Alito observed that "in the pre-computer, pre-Internet age, much of the privacy that people enjoyed was not the result of legal protections … it was the result simply of the difficulty of traveling around and gathering up information."

The court was hearing the Justice Department's appeal of a lower-court decision that said officers need a warrant before they may attach a GPS device to a vehicle, based on Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The case began in 2005 when federal agents secretly attached a GPS device to the Jeep of Antoine Jones while it was parked in a public lot. They used the evidence of Jones' travels over four weeks, including to a stash house in Fort Washington, Md., to help win a conviction for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

The Justice Department contended its surveillance was valid under United States v. Knotts, a 1983 Supreme Court decision that declared the use of a beeper to track a suspect driving to a drug lab was not a search under the Fourth Amendment.

During a vigorous hour of arguments Tuesday, Deputy Solicitor General Dreeben sought to quell justices' worries about blanket tracking.

"This case does not involve 24-hour surveillance of every citizen of the United States," he said. "It involves following one suspected drug dealer as to whom there was very strong suspicion."

Jones' lawyer, Stephen Leckar, countered that GPS constitutes a "robotic" and pervasive intrusion on people's lives that greatly threatens personal privacy. "GPS in your car, without a warrant," he said, "is like (being) unable to get rid of an uninvited stranger."

Justices referred to the sweeping nature of GPS but worried about how to distinguish it, for example, from government's use of cameras on public streets.