Big Brother is watching you, but really it could be

While legal pundits will be debating the failure of Initiative 26, another very important issue concerning personal privacy rights is being argued in front of the nation’s highest court. 

The Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments about whether GPS tracking without a warrant is constitutional or not. The present case, the United States v. Jones, is set to become a landmark case in terms of the relationship between technology and Fourth Amendment rights.  

The Fourth Amendment provides that all citizens should be secure in their person and property from unreasonable searches and seizures. However, there are quite a few loopholes to this doctrine; the most related one comes from a 1983 Supreme Court case in which the court found that placing an electronic beeper in a car in order to follow it without a warrant was allowed. 

However, the issue in Jones presents quite a departure from that doctrine. The beeper technology employed in the 1983 case was only useful as long as law enforcement officers were following the vehicle within a certain range; the officers had to be physically tracking the vehicle for the beeper to function properly. 

To say technology has come a long way since 1983 is perhaps the understatement of the century. The GPS tracking at issue now could be done strictly through remote electronic means and gives law enforcement potentially unprecedented powers. 

If this all seems like something out of George Orwell’s “1984,” that’s not entirely too far off. One of the comforting facets of the Court’s 1983 ruling was that there had to be an element of personal involvement in the tracking. It provided some measure of a safeguard, as law enforcement was not going to waste resources tracking people unlikely to be involved in the commission of crimes.

With this technology, there is no need for human involvement, and data can be gathered for relatively low cost on almost anyone at any time. There is no human involvement to act as a check on this surveillance power. The government argues that it can physically track someone for an extended period of time without a warrant, and GPS would simply be the electronic version of that. 

However, this argument once again fails because the required manpower to physically track someone acts as a legitimate check on that power. This is why this kind of surveillance should require a warrant: to put the human element back into surveillance. In order to obtain a warrant, a judge has to be presented with the evidence and find the type of surveillance reasonable. Allowing the judge to be the human element would provide the requisite safeguards to ensure the GPS surveillance doesn’t actually infringe on the privacy rights of citizens.  

Today, developments in technology come faster than anyone could have ever anticipated, especially the founding fathers when they were drafting the Constitution. 

They couldn’t fathom universal indoor plumbing when they enumerated the rights of the citizens of this country, let alone remote electronic GPS surveillance and tracking on cars. 

One limitation of the judicial system is that it is purely reactive; someone’s rights have to be violated for a suit to be brought. With rapidly developing technology, the Court constantly has to play catch-up to bridge the gap between the technology and the rights of the people. 

In this scenario, the citizen and his or her rights are always the losers, which is why this case is problematic. While the court deliberates, citizens’ privacy rights are left in limbo, and that is an unacceptable situation.

Brittany Sharkey is a second-year law student from Oceanside, Calif.  Follow her on Twitter @brittanysharkey.