This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s technology jurisprudence can be best understood as protecting the privacy interest of elites. After providing an overview of the major technology cases from Olmstead to Kyllo, the Article focuses on the recent case of United States v Jones. The Article does not contend that the Court intended to …
The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Jones clearly established that use of GPS tracking surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. But the Court left many other questions unanswered about the nature and scope of the constitutional privacy right in location data. A review of lower court decisions in the wake of …
In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the proposition that the Government can surreptitiously electronically track vehicle location for an entire month without Fourth Amendment restraint. While the Court’s three opinions leave much uncertain, in one perspective they fit nicely within a long string of cases in which the Court is cautiously …
On January 23, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in …
While the Jones Court held unanimously that the Government’s use of a GPS device to track Antoine Jones’s vehicle for twenty-eight days was a Fourth Amendment search, the Justices disagreed on the facts and rationale supporting the holding. Beyond the very narrow trespass-based search theory regulating the Government’s attachment of a GPS device to Jones’s …
This Article argues that supporters and detractors of the concurring opinions in United States v. Jones have overemphasized the role of the “mosaic” or “aggregation” theory in the concurrences. This has led to a misreading of those opinions, an overly narrow view of the Justices’ privacy concerns, and an obscuring of two limiting principles that …
