How long 'til the radar-detector manufacturers start making a "GPS Blocker"?

This comes from Newsday.com :

GPS decision starts privacy debate anew
By Robin Topping
Staff Writer

May 20, 2004


A Nassau County Court judge's decision establishing the state's first limits on police use of the Global Positioning System is likely the first link in what could become a chain of litigation defining how government can track its citizens, legal experts say.

Judge Joseph Calabrese this month agreed with a Lawrence man who said police should have obtained a warrant before they planted a GPS device on the car he was driving as part of an investigation into a string of burglaries. Calabrese ruled that police now have to first show a judge they have "probable cause to believe evidence of a crime is likely to be found" by using a GPS device.

At the same time, Calabrese decided that prosecutors can use incriminating GPS evidence against Richard Lacey at his trial. Lacey claimed that police had violated his privacy and Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. However, the judge said Lacey didn't "have a reasonable expectation of privacy" because he wasn't driving his own car and it was being used "for the sole purpose of furthering a criminal enterprise."

It is not clear whether the case will be appealed. But already, there have been legal challenges to police use of the devices in more than a half-dozen states. It seems inevitable, lawyers say, that such challenges are headed to higher courts, as part of the struggle between privacy concerns and government surveillance.

Defense lawyers say the courts have to impose controls over such novel technology.

"It's another example of the courts ... dealing with cases based on technological advances that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago, so it's a sound decision from that point of view," said Barry Kamins, a law professor at Brooklyn and Fordham Law Schools who wrote the search and seizure handbook.

Civil libertarians are concerned that the ease of the technology will make it tempting for police to use. "This worries the hell out of me because it is so easily done and there is nothing we can do about it," said John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas attorney and expert on government searches.

Hall says those challenging police use of GPS - with or without a warrant - are at a disadvantage because a public street is not considered a private place and the door has already been opened with past decisions on older technology.

"If the police are tailing you or following you with a helicopter, how is that different? You're going down a public highway ... " Hall said.

Local law enforcement officials contend GPS is just a high-tech version of conventional police surveillance. Nassau Police Commissioner James Lawrence said, "It's tantamount to a cop following someone around. There is no listening device, no camera."

Nassau prosecutors, in fact, argued in pretrial hearings that they didn't need a warrant for the GPS device in the Lacey case, based on a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court involving a now outdated beeper method of tracking vehicles.

"Our position was that the law allows it without a warrant," said Nassau Chief Assistant District Attorney Patrick McCormack. "The issue is this: What expectation of privacy do you have when walking down the street or driving your car down a public street?"

But Calabrese wrote that he was guided by more recent rulings, such as a 2003 opinion out of Washington State's Supreme Court, which said police had the right to plant a GPS device on a murder suspect's car, but only after getting a warrant. The man unknowingly led police to his daughter's grave, after denying knowledge of her death.

Lacey's attorney, Bruce Barket of Garden City, says a warrant is vital. He said, "If they don't need a warrant, what is to stop them from following a defense lawyer during a hotly contested trial? Or monitoring a fringe political group?"

Lawrence, however, said GPS is used sparingly and only in appropriate cases. He said the advantage of it is that police don't have to dispatch teams of officers and risk exposure and they can view the information at any time.

Defense attorneys acknowledge there is little they can do to stop the technology because it already has a firm foothold in the law. "It's Orwellian and it's creepy," Hall said, "but the problem is that the roots of the issue have been resolved long before GPS came along."