The Supreme Court issued a landmark decision Monday regarding warantless surveillance that could have vast implications for privacy and technology in the years to come. In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the police violated the Constitution when they placed a GPS device on the underside of a suspect’s car and used the device to track and record his movements for a month. The court, however, was closely divided on its reasoning for the decision, and the split could leave several important privacy-related questions unresolved.
The question in the case was whether Washington, D.C. police violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the defendant, Antoine Jones, when they placed a GPS tracking device on his car to gather evidence for a potential drug trafficking case. The government argued that Jones had no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in either the location of the device — the underside of his car — or in the places where he drove the car, such as public roads. The police failed to obtain a warrant before attaching the device to Jones’s car.