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WASHINGTON -- The installation of a GPS tracking device onto a suspect's car constitutes a search -- and therefore could require a warrant -- the Supreme Court unanimously held on Monday morning. The justices, however, employed radically different rationales to come to their answer, leaving unsettled the question of how much protection one may expect from the Fourth Amendment in the digital age.

The case, United States v. Jones, arose from the Washington, D.C., police department's use of evidence gathered from Antoine Jones' car that tied him to a stash house in Maryland. A trial court convicted Jones and sentenced him to life in prison, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed, finding that the police's gathering of evidence after its warrant for the GPS tracking had expired violated the Fourth Amendment.

When Jones arrived at the Supreme Court, the justices faced the difficult question of how far the government can go in monitoring a person's movements in an age when modern technology may have eroded a person's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the linchpin of modern Fourth Amendment case law.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, commanding five justices' votes, sidestepped the question altogether by resorting to the more narrow view of the Fourth Amendment that prevailed prior to 1967, when Katz v. United States introduced the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test.

"The text of the Fourth Amendment," wrote Scalia, "reflects its close connection to property, since otherwise it would have referred simply to 'the right http://www.iamsport.org/pg/pages/view/28126697 to protect more ethereal, but no less invasive, governmental intrusions on privacy -- including wiretapped phone conversations and, for at least the http://robusttail3022.sosblogs.com/The-first-blog-b1/Stopping-carjacking-criminals-in-their-tracks-by-text-b1-p12.htm