Worried about Big Brother watching you? So is the Supreme Court, which handed down a unanimous ruling this week that dealt a blow to the U.S. Justice Department's alarming advocacy of using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to track suspected criminals for prolonged periods without their knowledge.
In a case that weighed computer technology capabilities against Americans' privacy rights, the justices wrestled with what the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches means in the electronically sophisticated 21st century.
The justices made a wise decision, though they muddied the matter by splitting 5-4 over how the Fourth Amendment applied. The case involved a District of Columbia nightclub owner serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2008 of drug trafficking based on evidence gathered from a GPS device that the FBI secretly attached to his Jeep.
The justices said the federal agents' actions simply didn't gel with the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches and, therefore, police or federal agents need a warrant before tracking suspects in this way, they said.
"We hold that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a 'search,'" wrote Justice Antonin Scalia.
No doubt GPS devices are valuable tools for fighting crime. In many ways, we're fortunate to live in an age when sophisticated technological tools can help convict criminals. But those tools shouldn't be used to erode constitutional privacy protections.
In arguing his case before the court in November, Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Michael Dreeben said that no one -- not even Supreme Court justices -- should expect privacy when driving on public roadways. That scary scenario didn't sit well with Justice Stephen Breyer, who saw shades of George Orwell's futuristic novel "1984" in the argument.
"If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States," he told Dreeben. That simply wasn't reasonable or constitutional, he ruled this week.