http://www.phoebuslaw.com/blog/landm...ithout-warrant
Quote:
In a landmark decision issued today, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement to get a warrant before they may attach a GPS device to a vehicle in order to track the movements of a suspect in a criminal investigation. In the case of United States v. Jones, investigators had attached a GPS unit to the undercarriage of a vehicle driven by a suspected drug dealer. The GPS unit was configured to use a cell phone to call and report his location. Over about a month of time, nearly 4,000 pages of data about his location was sent to law enforcement. During the month-long surveillance, they went underneath Jones' vehicle a second time and replaced the battery.
The Supreme Court held that the property interests of the vehicle's driver required the police to first obtain a warrant before using a GPS device. Importantly, the Court distinguished the case of Jones from a prior decision of U.S. v. Knotts, which had upheld the use of a beeper hidden in a canister to track a chemical shipment. Because the beeper in that case was placed with the consent of the container's owner before it was transferred to the suspect, it was different than Jones. No one in Jones consented to the placement of the GPS device.
Decision confirms Maryland DNR's 2011 monitoring of watermen was illegal
Last winter, commercial watermen located GPS tracking devices that had been surreptitiously placed on their workboats, allowing Maryland's DNR and the Natural Resources Police to monitor their movements. When questioned by lawmakers on whether they had a warrant, DNR would only say that they "followed all necessary law and procedure". Today's Supreme Court decision makes clear that DNR's monitoring of watermen was illegal. Lawmakers in Annapolis had already introduced legislation to prohibit DNR from using these devices without a court order, a requirement that today's Supreme Court decision will make the law of the land.
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BUT, there's two sides to every story, and the truth is usually somewhere in between.
This article does confirm the Supreme Court ruling, but it also includes info carefully ignored by the piece written above:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...us-gps-ruling/
Quote:
The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases.The convoluted decision, in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle was not a search. The government had told the high court that it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant.“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,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority. The majority declined to say whether that search was unreasonable and required a warrant.
All nine justices, however, agreed to toss out the life sentence of a District of Columbia drug dealer who was the subject of a warrantless, 28-day surveillance via GPS.
Four justices in a minority opinion said that the prolonged GPS surveillance in this case amounted to a search needing a warrant. But the minority opinion was silent on whether GPS monitoring for shorter periods would require one.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor voted with the majority, but wrote in a separate, solo opinion that both the majority and minority opinions were valid. She also suggested that Americans have more rights to privacy in data held by phone and internet companies than the Supreme Court has held in the past.
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It was a unanimous decision, even if many Justices had differing opinions on why it was illegal.
So now some questions remain: Did the MD DNR have warrants allowing them to attach tracking devices to these peoples' boats?
Regardless of the answer, how long will they stall before either providing the warrants or admitting they never got them?
And will they, in typical MD government fashion simply ignore the ruling until some waterman has the money to challenge the government in court?