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Originally posted by AnthonyT:

Hello,

Not sure if this has been posted already, apologies if so.

Apparently, it is now illegal to keep secrets from the government. It is no longer their responsibility to ferret out your secrets. Now, you must produce those secrets for them so that they can sift them and prosecute you for any...

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WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) — In a major decision on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that police need a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a person's car.

The ruling, which marked the justices' first-ever review of GPS tracking, was unanimous. The justices divided, however, on how the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to such high-tech tracking.

The case, which during November oral arguments prompted justices' references to George Orwell's futuristic novel 1984, ensures that police cannot use the Global Positioning System to continuously track a suspect before presenting sufficient grounds and obtaining a warrant from a judge.

Monday's decision specifically applies when police install a GPS tracking device on a person's car, but five justices suggested in concurring statements that a warrant might similarly be needed for prolonged surveillance through smartphones or other devices with GPS capabilities.

The Global Positioning System, originally developed for the military, relies on satellites that transmit to receivers that calculate the latitude and longitude of a location. A GPS device installed by police can be used to follow a person 24 hours a day. Data can be collected and analyzed far more efficiently and economically than if a team of agents followed a person.

The court reversed the cocaine-trafficking conviction of a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner. In 2005, police attached a GPS device to a Jeep owned by Antoine Jones while it was parked in a public lot. Agents then used evidence of Jones' travels over four weeks to help win the conviction on conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Civil libertarians and defense lawyers praised the ruling in United States v. Jones. The "Fourth Amendment must continue to protect against government intrusions even in the face of modern technological surveillance tools," said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which was among the groups that sided with Jones. The Justice Department, which had appealed a lower court's decision requiring a warrant for GPS tracking, had no public response to the decision.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the main opinion for the court, said "the government's physical intrusion on the Jeep" to obtain information constitutes a search. He based his decision on the original roots of Fourth Amendment protection for property against government intrusions. Scalia was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

The four other justices, led by Samuel Alito, concurred only in the judgment for Jones. Alito said the case would be better analyzed by asking whether Jones' "reasonable expectations of privacy were violated by the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle he drove."

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Originally posted by CaveTroll:
The government already possesses your information in the format of 1's and 0's. By ordering her to decrypt her drive they are in fact ordering her to help them interpret the data in order to help convict her of a crime. Clearly unconstitutional. Technologically impaired judge, should be removed from the bench.

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