GPS tracking case has left unsettled questions

Source: AP-EXCITE

By ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Judges around the country are grappling with the ripple effects of a 2-year-old Supreme Court ruling on GPS tracking, reaching conflicting conclusions on the case's meaning and tackling unresolved questions that flare in a world where privacy and technology increasingly collide.

The January 2012 opinion in United States v. Jones set constitutional boundaries for law enforcement's use of GPS devices to track the whereabouts of criminal suspects. But the different legal rationales offered by the justices have left a muddled legal landscape for police and lower-court judges, who have struggled in the last two years with how and when to apply the decision — especially at a time when new technologies are developed at a faster rate than judicial opinions are issued.

The result is that courts in different jurisdictions have reached different conclusions on similar issues, providing little uniformity for law enforcement and judges on core constitutional questions. Technological advancements are forcing the issue more and more, a development magnified by a heightened national debate over privacy versus surveillance and the disclosure of the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records.

"Courts are all over the place on all of these issues," said Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group.

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Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140616/us--gps_tracking-1f69b3eacf.html

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File-This Feb. 3, 2014, file photo shows U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito holding up a figurine of himself that someone gave him, as he speaks at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. A 2-year-old Supreme Court decision has caused more confusion than clarity on how police may track the whereabouts of criminal suspects, illustrating how hard it is for the slow-moving judicial system to keep up with the light speed of technology. Alito, wrote that technological change can alter the public{2019}s expectation of privacy and that lawmakers may be better suited than judges to account for the changes. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee,File)