Supreme Court Grants Cert in Fourth Amendment Cases, will review GPS Privacy, Legitimacy of Cut and Paste Language in Warrants
By Jennifer Granick on June 29, 2011 at 11:31 am
[For the original of this post, with links, go to the ZwillGen blog]: The U.S. Supreme Court promises some interesting Fourth Amendment activity next term, having granted certiorari review in two important cases. In the first, United States v. Jones, FBI agents planted a GPS device on a car and then used it to track the position of the automobile every ten seconds for a full month, all without securing a search warrant. I helped file an amicus brief on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of the National Capital Area in Jones, urging the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to hold the search unconstitutional. It did, and that opinion is now on review. The Obama administration urged the high Court to reverse, arguing that individuals have no expectation of privacy in their movements on public streets under the 1973 case of U.S. v Knotts. In Knotts, officers used a beeper to help them figure out whether they were getting closer to or farther away from a can of drug precursor chemicals stored in a car. In the brief, we argued that Knotts didn't apply because the primitive beepers at use there were not analogous to the comprehensive surveillance information GPS technology can provide and the appellate court agreed:
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