The Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision, which reversed the conviction of Antoine Jones, a Washington, D.C. night club owner who was convicted of drug dealing based in part on data obtained from a GPS device placed in Jones’ wife’s car by law enforcement without first obtaining a warrant.
"It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted", Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the unanimous court opinion.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, praised the Supreme Court’s decision. “The Court’s determination that the government must obtain a search warrant before attaching a GPS device to a suspect’s car to monitor that suspect’s location highlights the many new privacy threats posed by new technologies and the pressing need to update our federal privacy laws”, he said.
However, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) expressed concern that the court left open the question of whether the police can use other forms of electronic tracking, such as using a cell phone to track a suspect. “While this ruling settles the question of whether law enforcement must get a warrant for government-installed tracking devices, it leaves questions related to other methods of electronically monitoring Americans’ movements unanswered….From reading the several opinions, it seems that a majority of the Supreme Court would agree that secretly turning someone’s cell phone into a tracking device without their knowledge is unconstitutional”, Wyden said.