Wisconsin residents have something to fear this morning. Last week Big Brother Justice, also known as the Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruled that police can attach GPS to cars without obtaining search warrants. In essence this means that police can use GPS to track anyone they want regardless of whether they are suspects in a crime.
The ruling stems back to the 2003 stalking conviction of Madison resident Michael Sveum. After a woman complained to police she was being stalked by Sveum, police attached a GPS tracking device to the man’s car while it was parked in his driveway. They then proceeded to track his movements for five weeks after which they retrieved the device’s information. It was used to confirm Sveum was indeed stalking the woman for which he was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.
Sveum filed an appeal saying that the warrantless GPS tracking violated his Fourth Amendment protection to unreasonable search and seizure. Last week’s ruling indicated that GPS tracking is not unconstitutional because the same information could be gathered by visual surveillance.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals was ironically disturbed by its own decision, after which it appealed to Wisconsin lawmakers to protect citizens from the abuses possible with GPS.
Warrantless GPS tracking has long been the subject of debate surrounding the Fourth Amendment. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union are currently lobbying federal lawmakers to enact law forcing law enforcement to have a warrant before tracking suspects with GPS. Even Google has joined in the fight, publicly stating it would vehemently fight any federal attempt to gain access to its location data.
This battle will play out for years to come and I for one am still working to form an opinion about it. While I constantly denounce people who call Google’s mapping services nothing more than a form of privacy intrusion, warrantless GPS tracking feels much more invasive to me. Commercial services such as Google Street View are remarkable and useful feats of technology and people who oppose it are usually the same one’s busted for their indiscretions via said imagery. But planting a GPS device under someone’s car in their own driveway? That invokes Big Brother feelings in me. What do you think?