SCOTUS: GPS Trackers Are a Form of Search and Seizure 114
schwit1 writes: If the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court clarified and affirmed that law on Monday, when it ruled on Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina (PDF), before sending the case back to that state's high court. The Court's short but unanimous opinion helps make sense of how the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, interacts with the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government. "The only theory we discern [...] is that the State's system of nonconsensual satellite-based monitoring does not entail a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That theory is inconsistent with this Court's precedents."
Like a breath of fresh air (Score:5, Insightful)
Every once in a (great) while, the SCOTUS actually makes a ruling in line with the constitution. Thank you for being loyal to the American way instead of just another corrupt bunch on this specific day.
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And they made it unanimously. Perhaps it's an april fools joke from the Roberts court?
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More cynically, there are enough cheaper and more convenient ways to track people nowadays than attaching a special-purpose GPS tracker to their property, that pretending to value the Constitution just this once is worth more than the inconvenience of getting a warrant for those few times they want to use a physical GPS tracker.
I'll still cheer their doing the right thing this once, but if they want my general approval they still have way more to do.
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I'll still cheer their doing the right thing this once, but if they want my general approval they still have way more to do.
They've made a decent start for 2015, though. Among other things, I am holding onto hope for a ruling on King v. Burwell that reflects the actual law and Constitution, rather than ideology.
Re:Like a breath of fresh air (Score:4, Informative)
The issue in this case though involves a twice convicted sex offender being required to wear a tracking monitor. The lower courts thought that this didn't even count as a search, a decision rejected by the SCOTUS. Now the lower courts have to decide if this was a reasonable search or not. This is not a case of the government sneaking around to spy on someone or bypassing the (state) courts, everything was very clearly out in the open.
The SCOTUS has already ruled that getting onto private property in order to install a tracker was not supported without a warrant (even if this means sneaking into someone's automobile that's parked in a public place). So this current ruling feels like just a minor tweak. Now the tricky stuff coming up in the future: when is this tracking reasonable or not; and can you track someone w/o a warrant using publicly available information rather than GPS trackers.
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This is entirely consistent with their precedent in other rulings, so it's not really a suprise I think. The outcome really is that now the lower courts have to decide if this was a "reasonable" search or not, and that's a much trickier question I think.
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Unfortunately, fortunately, the rich want to lie, cheat and steal and they need privacy to do so, especially when corrupting government. So any laws that are equally applied are blocked in preference to newer laws that are not equally applied. Easy example of totally biased law, steal from a poor person and it is petty larceny, steal from a rich person and it is grand larceny and the investigation, prosecution and penalties hugely differ. In the case of the poor victim, meh tough luck suck it up where as f
Re:Like a breath of fresh air (Score:4, Informative)
You clearly don't understand the difference between petty and grand larceny. Take the chip off your shoulder. You have zero evidence that the rich lie, cheat and steal at a rate higher than middle or low income people.
Just to clarify, the threshold in most of the U.S. is only $400, and hasn't changed in decades. From Wikipedia...
Grand larceny is typically defined as larceny of a more significant amount of property. In the US, it is often defined as an amount valued at $400 or more. In New York, grand larceny refers to amounts of $1,000 or more. Grand larceny is often classified as a felony with the concomitant possibility of a harsher sentence. In Virginia the threshold is only $5 if taken from a person, or $200 if not taken from the person.[38] The same penalty applies for stealing checks as for cash or other valuables.
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Not really. It would not be a 4th amendment violation because you would be agreeing to have it installed as a condition of having your car registered which we have already agreed, society as a whole, is not a violation of any rights. This is much clearer an issue than we can force you to buy health insurance or tax you for not doing so because your not having insurance might negatively affect interstate commerce.
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I don't think it's that simple. It would seem that there would need to be a way to opt out of the tracking and not lose the ability to own and use a car.
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Says the AC internet tough guy.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to look a gift outbreak of common sense in the mouth, but how the fuck can GPS trackers be a form of search and seizure and civil forfeiture NOT be a form of search and seizure? Some measure of consistency in our right to be secure in our papers and shit would be nice.
The 4th amendment of the US constitution protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
I'll grant you that civil forfeiture is a form of search and seizure, but is it unreasonable in all contexts?
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
get pulled over for some petty crime, better not have an expensive car because it will be taken
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The fact that they can take a vehicle when the owner wasn't even involved in the incident still blows my mind.
There was a case of this years ago when a man used his wife's car, and got caught soliciting a prostitute (undercover cop).
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There are two types of civil forfeiture:
There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because it's involved in a crime, after you're convicted, they keep it. This is entirely reasonable in most cases and is not the kind that most people who talk about Civil Forfeiture are actually talking about. For one thing, you're actually convicted before they get it for keeps.
Then there's the kind where a cop pulls you over, finds ten grand in an enve
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There are two types of civil forfeiture:
There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because it's involved in a crime, after you're convicted, they keep it. This is entirely reasonable in most cases and is not the kind that most people who talk about Civil Forfeiture are actually talking about. For one thing, you're actually convicted before they get it for keeps.
Then there's the kind where a cop pulls you over, finds ten grand in an envelope under your seat, takes it because you -might- be using it to buy drugs (or you just sold a bunch), not that there's any evidence indicating that, files suit -against the money-, and keeps it. Or the kind where your kid sold pot from your house and they take your house the same way. This is the kind of civil forfeiture that people complain about when they talk about it. This is utter bullshit.
You are dangerously misinformed on this issue. The latter case mostly does not exist. The former, mostly nobody disagrees with. One of the major problems with the system is not so much that the stuff is sold, but that it usually goes directly to the budget or even pension of the police department that does the seizure. Giving police officers fiscal incentive to subvert justice is bad, period, even in the hand holding nice case. Really it is mostly something between the first and second case, where a pe
Re:So... (Score:4)
You are dangerously misinformed on this issue. The latter case mostly does not exist.
Uh... if that's what you think, GP might actually be more informed about the issue than you are.
I am reminded back when I first started reading electronic bulletin boards, and I found EFFector Online from EFF, and the pubication from EPIC, whatever that was called.
At the time, civil forfeiture was a big deal as it related to online crimes, and the publications were chock full of examples of abuse. Like the greenhouse operator who liked to order his annual shrubs at market using cash... stopped at the airport, and was deemed to be a drug dealer because of his old jeans and excessive cash.
He was never charged with a crime. He never had a forfeiture hearing. But he never got his $30,000 back, either.
There are LOTS of such stories, from very reliable sources. I would consider EFF to be one such.
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Really it is mostly something between the first and second case, where a person is found innocent of a crime, but their stuff has a second forfeiture trial where the burden of proof is on the accused to show that it could not have been used in a crime. The stuff has a lower standard of justice, and the people that take it have an incentive to lie.... The math is simple.
Whining about an absurdly uncommon occurrence, while ignoring the people who are being robbed every day, does a disservice to the debate. Framing the debate as the guilty and the never charged, is terrible to the point of being a straw man, which makes your anti-civil-forfeiture position confusing.
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There is plenty of evidence that it isn't "an absurdly uncommon occurrence" , but instead in some parts of the country it is routine. And, actually, he his "whining" about the same people, because many of those civil forfeitures are state-sanctioned (often highway) robbery.
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Whining about an absurdly uncommon occurrence,
Even 10 times would far too often. And nobody was whining.
while ignoring the people who are being robbed every day
Who was ignoring this? Certainly not me, and I don't think anyone else.
Framing the debate as the guilty and the never charged, is terrible to the point of being a straw man, which makes your anti-civil-forfeiture position confusing.
Again, nobody did this. Not me, and not GP.
GP mentioned losing a house. There was an actual case like this in California. An innocent elderly couple lost their home and large plot of land to civil forfeiture because somebody had planted a few pot plants OUTSIDE their property line.
Ignoring the outrageous cases that do occasionally happen is no less erroneous than what you ac
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Let's stick with an analysis of the text in question, the post to which mine replied.
The text begins with, "There are two types of civil forfeiture", indicating an intention to describe two and only two types of scenario. Following this are two paragraphs clearly defining two types of persons from whom property is seized. First the text describes guilty people who totally deserve it, "There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because i
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It's not unreasonable if you can convince a judge to sign a warrant.
Otherwise, yes, it's unreasonable. Consider how much trouble you'd be in if you attached a GPS tracker of your own to a police car.
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It's not unreasonable if you can convince a judge to sign a warrant.
Strictly speaking, that's not true either. There are an uncountable number of cases where judges were convinced to sign a warrant based on false statements or false evidence, for example.
So the warrant was not a legal warrant, and the search was therefore not legal, either.
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If that was the case, it would be trivial to get the evidence thrown out.
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If that was the case, it would be trivial to get the evidence thrown out.
It's seldom trivial to get evidence thrown out. You pretty much have to show that they were lying. Not always easy.
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I'll grant you that civil forfeiture is a form of search and seizure, but is it unreasonable in all contexts?
Of course not. However, we do know of quite a few cases of abuse occurring. And for every one we know about, there are probably at least several we don't.
I don't think GP was referring to the basic concept of any civil forfeiture, though I could be wrong. I think it was a reference to the many cases of abuse.
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yes, it is unreasonable in all contexts. if a crime is evinced, you charge the person and seize evidence. Charging an inanimate object with a crime is bypassing the 4th amendment.
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Yes, it is always unreasonable because it happens without the owner being found guilty in a court of law. In fact, it happens without any sort of due process.
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I'll grant you that civil forfeiture is a form of search and seizure, but is it unreasonable in all contexts?
Taking a person's property without an associated criminal conviction, if you think that is reasonable in any context I wonder what you would think is actually unreasonable?
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No, not all contexts. The contexts where it is not unreasonable are the contexts where the person losing property is actually charged and convicted of a crime. you know, the case where civil forfeiture does not need to be used because criminal law is in play.
The 4th amendment was put in place mainly to stop stuff like civil forfeiture from happening.
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Not to look a gift outbreak of common sense in the mouth, but how the fuck can GPS trackers be a form of search and seizure and civil forfeiture NOT be a form of search and seizure? Some measure of consistency in our right to be secure in our papers and shit would be nice.
not to justify civil forfeiture (because i do think it's abused way too much), but typically such forfeiture comes after a warrant-authorized search or a search justified by one of the "exigent circumstances" exceptions to warrantless searches.
it's a bit of a different issue.
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Unfortunately, many searches leading to civil forfeiture are made when a person doesn't realize he can say no when the cop asks to search his car. When you grant permission, all the rules about warrants and exigent circumstances get pitched because you gave consent. If there was ever a need to inform people of their basic rights, it's when a cop asks to search your car for no reason. They should be forced to read you your rights when they ask so that you can say no with confidence.
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Actually, I'd disagree with that, partially. Granting permission to search your stuff is not permission to take your stuff, unless that stuff is illegal or involved in the commission of a crime. You've waived a portion of one right, not all of them.
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If you grant permission to search your car and they find a large amount of cash, it can be forfeit even if you haven't been convicted of a crime. That's the way civil forfeiture works in this country.
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If I sound bitter it is because it did happen to me. Pulled over for driving a rolling pile of crap after work on my way home, accused of doing a burn out (car was a physically incapable of doing so), then accused of being drunk, refused letting them search my car, had a K9 unit brought in that "alerted" on drugs, they searched my car anyway and found
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That's the problem, most states interpret civil forfeiture as "your property is guilty of a crime", such as money laundering/drugs, and can be taken and treated as if it's not entitled to due process ...even without charging YOU with a crime. (Nevermind that the constitution *specifically* forbids this.) Additionally, a lot of officers are trained to ask if you're carrying cash... as if that's illegal.
Granting permission to search gives the opportunity to make-up some BS. Refusing/saying "I don't talk to
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Refusing/saying "I don't talk to police" pisses them off, as well - causing them to get their dogs/such. But still....
Unless you are giving testimony in connection to a crime unrelated to you (ie. you witnessed something and are specifically not charged with anything) you should NEVER talk to a cop [slashdot.org]. The whole "Everything you say, can and WILL"-thing isn't said just to scare you.
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I don't keep anything in my vehicles that any cop would be interested in (I have neighbors who steal, so my cars are empty), but I still wouldn't say yes to a search.
They make a mess and don't clean it up. I swear, they do it for kicks.
If you tell them no, and they don't have a good reason to suspect you actually have something, they usually talk tough a bit and let you go. If they're pissed off enough they'll make you wait on a drug dog to sniff around in your car.
A friend of mine started doing this, and
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They should be forced to read you your rights when they ask so that you can say no with confidence.
The whole "Reading you your rights"-thing, only really applies in cases where you are being charged and questioned.
And strictly speaking, even if you technically have the right to deny the police the right to search your person or vehicle, all that will happen if you do that is that the police will interpret that as evidence of guilt and arrest you, at which point searching you or your vehicle becomes a security requirement - it represents an unacceptable risk to bring you into custody without searching you
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That doesn't mean I agree with it, but hell, you asked.
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Yes, but that stuff is, without evidence to the contrary, -my- stuff, and should thus be protected. It comes under the 'effects' part of 'persons, houses, papers, and effects.'
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Well, for starters, civil forfeiture is about your non-living stuff, and the 4th Amendment applies to YOU, a living being with enumerable rights.
Under that argument, it is not unreasonable search for the police to enter your home whenever they wish. After all, your home is non-living stuff and the fourth amendment applies only to you.
I think taking things from a living being with enumerable rights counts as a violation of 1) due process (since there has been no due process at all), 2) the fourth amendment right to be secure in one's person AND property, and 3) the concept of innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
When your car is seized a
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After you sober up you can retrieve your vehicle but you have to pay the cost of towing and possibly as storage fee if you take to long to get your vehicle. In some cases they can hold your vehicle if you were driving without insurance or a valid drivers license but they will release the vehicle to a friend or relative who has insurance and a valid license. Unfortunately I have some first hand knowledge of the procedures due to some foolish indiscretions in my youth.
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Some states (New York I believe is one) actually seize your car, it is a law on the books.
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Because the supreme court under pressure from the Reagan administration, that was promising to only use it against drug dealers in the drug war, convinced the court to carve out an exception. The only problem is the exception is now the rule. These exceptions were created to fight the "drug war". And like every exception the government has been given they've turned around and used it against everyone they can.
Take for example the expanded penalties that were passed after 9/11 for using a weapon of mass dest
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By definition, the courts are constitutional. Get off your high horse and think about what you said. The supreme court rules what is and isn't constitutional. They CANNOT be found unconstitutional.
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Not to look a gift outbreak of common sense in the mouth, but how the fuck can GPS trackers be a form of search and seizure and civil forfeiture NOT be a form of search and seizure?
It's a form of seizure, but the supreme court hasn't found it an unreasonable one. And it's been used for a very long time. Basically, the issue was that without forfeiture they had a hard time catching the owners of smuggling ships. As long as you can't establish them as an accessory to the crime or you have jurisdiction problems, they can legally provide the supplies while the criminals operate on an asset-less basis. So the solution was to declare the assets - in this case the ship - used in illegal acts
"puts" (Score:5, Insightful)
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The radiation-based tracking devices transmit too loudly and really are a death by torture device.
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Well, if you're referring to a iPhone or something similar, they need a warrant to access it, IIRC.
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Well, if you're referring to a iPhone or something similar, they need a warrant to access it, IIRC.
To look at the contents on the iPhone, yes, the court said a warrant is required, but what about the cell tower info that tracks your location whenever the phone is on, i.e. "metadata"? Most people nowadays are always with their phone and their phones are always on, so effectively people are providing the GPS trackers for the police. It is the people that don't always carry their phone, or turn them off at key times, namely that know about this tracking potential, that force law enforcement to extraordina
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According to the article, this has yet to be decided by the courts. This particular case was essentially a no-brainer as it didn't even have to bother with reasonable or unreasonable, but only whether this tracking counted as a search or not.
It's an improvement. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's an improvement. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Queue the OMG COMMON SENSE!!!1... (Score:2)
...that happens every year when SCOTUS rules that way millennials think they want.
Queue the whining (Score:1)
... that happens every year when SCOTUS rules against what the big government supporters think they want.
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If you think that equating "common sense" with "agrees with me" is particularly a millenial thing, then you're definitely doing the same thing yourself.
This is why it's so vital (Score:3)
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I've always done it that way: Buy a humble bundle, give every last dime to the EFF.
Don't ask, don't tell (Score:1)
So are all StingRay units shut down now? Or is an NDA a good enough reason to ignore the 4th amendment?
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Probably not, since this ruling had nothing to do with Stingray.
I guess planting a GPS device to track someone and hijacking their phone to track them are completely different.
Re:Don't ask, don't tell (Score:5, Informative)
Jeez, RTFA.
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This ruling doesn't even have anything to do with planting a tracking device. It is in regards to an individual who has been convicted of multiple sexual offences who has served his time and is being required by the State of North Carolina to wear a GPS anklet for the rest of his life. He challenged that on 4th amendment grounds. NC argued successfully (at the state level) that this requirement is not a search. The SCOTUS disagreed and sent the case back to NC.
Jeez, RTFA.
Combative much? Let me rearrange your words so you can see how it relates to my original point, and you tell me how I did it wrong, and then I'll let you deal with the fact that you're chasing your own tail while barking at me...
NC argued [that] wear[ing] a GPS anklet ... is not a search
The SCOTUS disagreed
First line of the article:
If the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Jeez, what as that about reading the article again?
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1. A Stingray is not synonymous to a GPS tracker (placed knowingly or otherwise.)
2. North Carolina, stupidly made the argument that a GPS tracker is not a search, despite various SCOTUS rulings otherwise.
3. SCOTUS reiterated it's previous position on GPS trackers and sent the case back to NC.
At no point in time di the SCOTUS make any ruling that would impact anything other than the assertion that a GPS tracker is not a search. Chances are that NC will revise their argu
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Have any police departments actually been prosecuted though? I rather doubt it.
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Of course not. If we prosecute them the terrorists will run amok.
Did anyone (Score:3)
see the Duuhhhhh!!! at the end of the opinion.
So None At All (Score:3)
We all know how much protection a constitutional law provides.
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Isn't Seizure a medical term? Like in epileptic seizure? I haven't seen it used in context of police policy before. I always hear confiscate when people mean to take possession of by legal authority, not seizure. Just saying.
Oh, you haven't heard it in that context so it means it is being used incorrectly? At least as far back as the writing of the US Constitution it has been used:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Also:
seizure
noun
1.
Manditory Car Tracking (Score:2)
Police and cities might not like it (I'll get back to that in a second) but I think car tracking should be mandatory for everyone. Cars should track their position and speed and report to local antennas located along the road and at intersections where there are signals and infrastructure in place. This achieves a few things...
Traffic tickets are automated. And not just speeding tickets. So everyone will become better drivers since it's no longer a game of catching someone doing something stupid and giving
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This will NEVER work. Criminals, by definition, don't obey the law. It would be like prohibition; be it drugs, or guns, or cheap cigarettes in New York; all it will accomplish is criminalize the honest folk. Your plan will only work within a city anyway, once you leave the city limits the tracking will stop because there won't be any hardwired infrastructure and there is only so much bandwidth by radio it won't support tracking the approximate 62 million registered vehicles in the US (answers.com).
You can't get away from the scene of a crime except on foot.
There are
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Having robotic enforcement of laws against mistake prone, imprecise human beings is an oppressive idea of the worst sort.
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You are young BlueCoder and there is nothing wrong with that. A society needs to be bound by rules but not straightjacketed by them. I don't want my car automatically slowing down when driving my injured children to the hospital. No one is perfect and circumstances alter cases. Society needs enough slop to stop too much friction. Make it to rigid and it breaks. Rigid people are seldom sane and happy.
Good luck taking out the 911 dispatch system because it is hackable or subject to social engineering.
I can't believe this is news (Score:1)
Just a matter of time for tower data and Stingers (Score:2)
Unfortunately, cops still recreate a chain of evidence to conceal their 4th amendment violations ( http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 ) and we'll need to make that itself into a crime to put
This should be obvious (Score:2)
If the State searches through records of geolocation, toll gates, even street cameras, these are searches. They must meet the limits of the Fourth Amendment.
The State SEARCHED...
What part of this is at all unclear?