Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the US District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion’’ and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.’’
The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time? Their answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures’’ applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously and comprehensively recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.
The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.
“The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,’’ said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
The case is an appeal from a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said last year that the government was simply seeking too much information.
