visagrunt wrote:
On the one hand, a warrant should have been readily available to police to embark on this investigatory method. If the police have reasonable grounds to believe that the vehicle or its owner are involved or will be involved in the commission of a crime I see no reason why they cannot present those grounds to a judge for the purpose of obtaining a warrant to clandestinely pursue the vehicle.
In the case under discussion, it seemed that the police had a "suspicion", but not enough evidence to support PC. Given that the world we live in is populated by liars, vengeful exes and others carrying petty grievances, it is only right that the police need more than a suspicion or a tip to begin an investigation. That, and whether or not they
could have tried for a warrant, they
chose not to and the court just said that is OK, which would seem to go against the American concept of private property at the very least.
visagrunt wrote:
On the other hand, driving a vehicle is a privilege, not a right--and it is a privilege which is exercised in the public domain. With this pivilege comes the obligation to display, unobscured, a license plate that uniquely identifies the vehicle. So, while you are on the road, any individual can see that your vehicle is in a particular location at a particular time.
It's the difference between wearing a nametag and wearing a tracking collar, you see the difference? Additionally, the main issue here seems to have been the warrant-less trespass onto private property by police officers, and the court majority's biased application of the law, in effect stating that you only can expect privacy on your own property if you wall it off.
visagrunt wrote:
So is the practice of attaching a GPS to the vehicle unreasonable? It is simplifying the accumulation of evidence that would be publicly available to the state in any event.
On balance, I don't think that the requirement to obtain a warrant is an onerous one. But that was not the question on which the court decided the matter.
That raises an interesting dilemma and a concept called "practical obscurity", which the arch example of which is public documents that are in a folder somewhere in a physical location. For years the reams of information that the government kept on it's citizens wasn't that big of a deal, because so much of it was in filing cabinets in various departments, and someone trying to run it down had to physically go to the right building and know what to ask for. Now, with more and more public databases going on the internet, it's become disgustingly easy to track down all sorts of information on just about anyone, since all those databases and files are only a mouse click away. I find this troubling, and think that new safeguards are required to protect people's privacy from snoopers both public and private.
I feel that placing a GPS on a car without a warrant is akin to an unreasonable search and seizure, in this case the target's private business being the thing searched. Absent a strong enough suspicion to pass legal muster, the government and it's agencies do not have the right to know where their citizens spend their day.
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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson
26 Aug 2010, 1:54 pm
