device to a vehicle and monitor its every move.
The decision directly impacts the case of an Egyptian-American Muslim who found a GPS tracker on his car in California and sued the FBI. That case drew widespread attention—and laughter—when the FBI demanded its tracker be given back!
The Supreme Court’s decision is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age. What’s more, it rejected the Obama Admin-istration’s position. The government had told the high court it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court without a warrant.
“We hold that the gov-ernment’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.
The California case may not be the only instance involving Muslim Americans. The FBI has not said why it fitted the GPS tracker to the car of Yasir Afifi in San Jose, California. Zahra Billoo, his lawyer said, “He fit the profile an Arab-American male, young, lives by himself, travels frequently to the Middle East to visit his family.” She said Afifi is stopped and questioned every time he returns to the United States.
But there was no indication of any criminal or terrorist activity by Afifi. As a result of Monday’s Supreme Court decision, the FBI will now have to go to a judge and show it has good reason to believe a crime has been committed that would warrant use of the GPS tracker.
In a footnote to the Supreme Court decision, Justice Scalia added that, “Whatever new methods of investigation may be devised, our task, at a minimum, is to decide whether the action in question would have constituted a ‘search’ within the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred.”
All nine justices agreed to toss out the death sentence of a District of Columbia drug dealer who was the subject of a warrantless, 28-day surveillance via GPS.
The justices agreed to hear the case to settle conflicting lower-court decisions — some of which ruled a warrant was necessary, while others found the government had unchecked GPS surveillance powers.
During oral arguments in the case in November, a number of justices invoked the specter of Big Brother if the police could secretly attach GPS devices on Americans’ cars without getting a probable-cause warrant.
The last time the high court considered the Fourth Amendment, technology and privacy in a major case was a decade ago, when the justices ruled that the authorities must obtain search warrants to employ thermal-imaging devices to detect indoor marijuana-growing operations, saying the imaging devices carry the potential to “shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.”
The government told the justices that that GPS devices have now become a common tool in crime fighting, saying it is employed “thousands” of times every year.
