You Make the Call: Does Vehicle GPS Tracking Without a Warrant Violate Any Right?
When I was kid I watched “This Week in Baseball” (also known at the time as “TWiB”) and there was always a cool bit about showing a replay from the week in which a close play was shown with a questionable umpire ruling. The tagline was “you make the call!” and there would be a commercial between the end of the replay and the answer on the field. Here’s my version of “you make the call!” from this week’s rulings.
David L. Foltz, Jr., was convicted of sexual assault when he was caught red-handed due, in part, because the police were able to track him driving his work-issue van around town after placing a battery-powered GPS device under the bumper. Foltz set up two primary arguments that the Virginia Court of Appeals knocked down: the GPS placement and tracking violated his Fourth Amendment rights and violated his right to privacy. Foltz asserted that the GPS installation was a search and a seizure and that the activation of the GPS and tracking was a violation of his expectation of privacy. The police did not obtain a search warrant and within the past few years had initiated over 150 similar GPS tracking devices without a warrant.
You make the call! Should it be legal for the police to install GPS devices on private vehicles and monitor the vehicle movements of private citizens without a warrant?
UPDATE:
A man in California recently found a tracking device on his vehicle while it was being fixed at an auto repair shop. He ended up posting pictures of it on the web and the FBI demanded it back. He complied and “[c]omments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.”
Similar to the Virginia case cited previously, Foltz v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the Ninth Circuit also recently decided that GPS tracking does not violate any rights and is available without a warrant.
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Reader's Comments
This doesn’t violate your fourth amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own vehicles.
Re GPS Vehicle Tracking: I agree, there typically is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a vehicle. Even if you assumed the ‘trackee’ is traveling over private land, it would not be illegal and would not violate any rights to have the vehicle tracked by an airplane. The problem arises when you think about someone tracking your vehicle it seems like an intrusion upon privacy. Theoretically, however, someone could be tracking us at any time, and because we are out in the open and publicly viewable, we would have no right to stop it.
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