US court reins in police snooping

The US Supreme Court has ruled that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a tracking device to a car or other vehicle, The LA Times reports.

The case involved the conviction of Antoine Jones, a suspected drug dealer in the district of Columbia, who was arrested after being monitored for 28 days by a global positioning system (GPS) device surreptitiously attached to his Jeep by law enforcement agents without a warrant.

However, civil rights advocates expressed disappointment over the court's decision to leave untouched the broader issue of whether police are required to obtain search warrants for geo-location tracking technologies, such as cellphone tracking systems or radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, Computerworld says.

The ruling sends a clear message that the court will not allow "technology advances to erode the constitutional right to privacy", says Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Centre for Democracy and Technology.

He adds: "The elephant in the room is the standard that law enforcement must meet for tracking individuals using cellphone tower data" and other tracking mechanisms.

The Wall Street Journal states that FBI agents have used GPS tracking devices in thousands of investigations each year.

The US government argues that attaching a tracking device or RFID tag to a car's undercarriage is too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.

Police were free to employ the tactic for any reason without showing probable cause to a magistrate and getting a search warrant, the government says.