- The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police cannot put a GPS device on a suspect's car to track his movements without a warrant, a test case that upholds basic privacy rights in the face of new surveillance technology.
The high court ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration, which had argued that a warrant was not required to use global positioning system devices to monitor a vehicle on public streets.
The justices unanimously upheld a precedent-setting ruling by a U.S. appeals court that the police must first obtain a warrant to use a GPS device for an extended period of time to covertly follow a suspect.
What if the police want to overtly follow a car on the public way for extended periods of time? Not the best use of resources we suppose, but restricted by the law?