Invisible Police Officers Ruled Illegal

An interesting
case out of Olympia, Washington. Police suspected William Bradley Jackson  of
the murder of his 9-year-old daughter, but had no evidence. So they
planted a GPS tracker in his vehicle and followed it until it led them
to the victim’s shallow grave.  The police said this was the same
as following a suspect in an unmarked car.  The court disagreed.

Police cannot attach a Global Positioning System tracker
to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant, the Washington Supreme Court
declared yesterday in the first such ruling in the nation.

”Use of GPS tracking devices is a particularly intrusive method of
surveillance, making it possible to acquire an enormous amount of personal
information about the citizen under circumstances where the individual
is unaware that every single vehicle trip taken and the duration of every
single stop may be recorded by the government,” Justice Barbara Madsen
wrote in the unanimous decision. She raised the prospect of citizens
being tracked to ”the strip club, the opera, the baseball game, the
`wrong’ side of town, the family planning
clinic, the labor rally.”

Attaching a GPS device to a car is ”the equivalent of placing an invisible
police officer in a person’s back seat,” said Doug Honig, a spokesman
for the ACLU.

from the
Boston Globe