This Time magazine column focuses on a privacy case the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear. Should the government be required to have a search warrant before placing a GPS tracking device on your car. The Court may hear arguments this fall.
Key to the government’s argument is the Supreme Court’s 1983 ruling in United States v. Knotts, which held that the police did not need a warrant to install an electronic beeper in a container of chemicals being transported on a truck. The court reasoned that since the police could have just watched the truck drive along the public streets, the Fourth Amendment did not prevent them from “augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed on them at birth with such enhancement as science and technology afforded them.”
Civil libertarians counter that there is a difference between a police officer visually monitoring someone’s movements and installing a device that can minutely track their comings and goings, day in and day out, for months at a time. A GPS device can do something that, as a practical matter, the police could never do with their own “sensory faculties.”
