By Lori Andrews
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this month in United States v. Jones provides little guidance about Fourth Amendment rights in today's digitized world, says a leading legal scholar.
Read full entry »The federal government did far better in the Supreme Court's GPS tracking case than has been generally recognized, says attorney Tom Goldstein of Scotusblog.com. Goldstein believes federal investigators are "more likely than not to prevail in a later case in which [they install] a GPS monitor without a warrant and tracks the individual for only a couple of days."
The alignment of justices importantly leaves two questions unanswered, Goldstein says: First, does the “search” caused by installing a GPS device require a warrant? The answer may be no, given that no member of the court squarely concludes it does and four Justices who join the Samuel Alito concurrence do not believe it constitutes a search at all. If no warrant is required for installation, is a warrant required for short-term monitoring of the GPS device? Again, the answer may be no, as the majority conspicuously avoids addressing this issue and four members of the Court squarely say that the answer is “no.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor alone says that this scenario “will require particular attention.”
Read full entry »A shroud of secrecy covers much of the search-warrant process in Vermont, reports the Burlington Free Press. Vermont police obtain hundreds of search warrants each year to enter private homes and businesses, to record conversations secretly, and to obtain GPS tracking information on personal vehicles -- but nobody keeps track of the numbers or the results of the warrants. The police who seek the warrants, the prosecutors who review the requests, and the state judges who ultimately must approve them all say they are not required to provide any type of annual report or compile any statistics about search warrants.
Warrants are obtained behind closed doors, the files are often sealed or withheld unless an arrest is made, and nobody in the criminal justice system is monitoring whether police provide the court an inventory of items taken during the search as required by the warrant. Chris Brock, clerk of Vermont Superior Court in Burlington, said only cases with criminal defendants are assigned docket numbers -- that is, an official identifier in court records -- and warrants themselves do not qualify. "We do not track search warrants," Brock said.
Read full entry »Frustrated for years by rampant piracy, the recording industry is pushing California's lawmakers to approve legislation that would allow warrantless searches of companies that press copies of compact discs and DVDs, reports the Los Angeles Times. The Recording Industry Association of America, in effect, wants to give law enforcement officials the power to enter manufacturing plants without notice or court orders to check that discs are legitimate and carry legally required identification marks.
The proposal is raising questions among U.S. constitutional law scholars as it quietly moves through the Legislature. "I can understand why this makes people nervous," said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. "We have the 4th Amendment that generally requires probable cause [for a search]. This is a huge exception." But the RIAA, which went on a well-publicized campaign eight years ago to sue individuals who shared music illegally online, argued that piracy has devastated the industry and nothing else has worked to stem the illegal activity. Net sales of CDs fell 82% in the last decade. There are an estimated 70 sophisticated replicator plants in the California that use state-of-the-art optical reading equipment to produce up to 85% of the counterfeit CDs nationwide.
Read full entry »
