Change of Subject: A legal argument to follow

A 1983 Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Knotts, set a clear precedent that tracking is legal without a warrant. In that case, Minnesota law enforcement officers used a "beeper" tracking device to help them physically follow a barrel of chloroform being transported from the Twin Cities to Wisconsin, where it would be used to manufacture illegal drugs....from Big Brother is Tracking You: GPS and the Fourth Amendment by Jordan Smith, Inside Criminal Justice

Smith's story is a curtain-raiser on the U.S. Supreme Court's upcoming consideration of a case concerning a law-enforcement task force's use of GPS technology in nabbing? suspected drug trafficker Antoine Jones.

The GPS data provided a 24/7 record of all of Jones' movements in the jeep over the next month?including, at times, the movements of his wife and family?and helped the government tie Jones to a suspected stash house in Maryland. In October 2005, agents executed search warrants for several locations, including the Jeep and the Maryland stash house. They recovered large amounts of cash, and large quantities of both powder and crack cocaine. Jones was eventually convicted on a charge of conspiring to sell drugs and was sentenced to life in prison. Jones appealed his conviction, arguing that the prolonged GPS surveillance by the government, without a valid warrant, constituted an illegal search.

The government argues that the GPS devices merely emulate the sort of legal surveillance that, theoretically, could have been conducted the old fashioned way by a 24/7 team of police officers tailing the suspect wherever he went on public roads.

The defense argues? that, because it would be ?infeasible" for law enforcement to conduct such surveillance the old fashioned way, doing it with GPS violates a person's? ?reasonable expectation of privacy? and constitutes a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Previously, an appellate court agreed with this view:

?Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, in his summation of the D.C.court?s unanimous? decision (favoring Jones), said the panel was persuaded that in fact Jones? movements during the month he was tracked by GPS were ?not exposed to the public."

"First, unlike one's movements during a single journey, the whole of one's movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil," he wrote.

"Second, the whole of one's movements is not exposed constructively even though each individual movement is exposed, because that whole reveals more?sometimes a great deal more?than does the sum of its parts."

There's a larger question here, one that society is still grappling with: How much law enforcement do we really want?

It would be possible -- it is possible -- to use cameras and tollway transponders to detect speeding and issue the same sorts of automatic citations that now come in the mail if you blow through a toll plaza without paying.

If you pass checkpoint A at noon and then pass checkpoint B 8 miles away at 12:06, a computer could easily spit out a ticket charging you with driving 80 mph, no human necessary.

Even rule-of-law absolutists tend instinctively not to like that idea. We want there to be some social wiggle room in the law.

Republicans, normally staunch on law and order, openly favor enabling tax cheats.? From an AP story in March:

Every dollar the Internal Revenue Service spends for audits, liens and seizing property from tax cheats brings in more than $10, a rate of return so good the Obama administration wants to boost the agency's budget. House Republicans, seeing the heavy hand of a too-big government, beg to differ. They've already voted to cut the IRS budget by $600 million this year and want bigger cuts in 2012.

The Freakanomics guys puzzled over this in 2006:

Unless you are personally cheating by one-fifth or more, you should be mad at the I.R.S. -- not because it's too vigilant, but because it's not nearly vigilant enough. Why should you pay your fair share when the agency lets a few hundred billion dollars of other people's money go uncollected every year?

They pointed to the mid-1980s when Congress finally allowed the IRS to ask for the Social Security numbers of people being claimed as dependents on tax returns and, the following year, discovered "seven million dependents had suddenly vanished from the tax rolls" resulting in $3 billion in revenues in a single year.

But I digress. GPS "surveillance." Your view:

Source: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2011/08/a-legal-argument-to-follow.html

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