{"id":1388,"date":"2013-01-18T22:13:15","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T22:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=1388"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:54:04","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:54:04","slug":"aclu-gets-nothing-on-government-surveillance-from-fbi-and-justice-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/aclu-gets-nothing-on-government-surveillance-from-fbi-and-justice-department\/","title":{"rendered":"ACLU Gets Nothing On Government Surveillance From FBI And Justice Department"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday, January 17, 2013, by Anne Marie Tosco
\nIn January of 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously held<\/a> that law enforcement could not put a warrantless GPS tracker on a suspect\u2019s car in United States v. Jones<\/span>. Following the ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a request<\/a> under the Freedom of Information Act compelling the FBI to disclose two memos related to GPS tracking, in order to determine how the agency planned to interpret the Court\u2019s decision. The ACLU learned of the memos when hearing Andrew Weissmann, FBI General Counsel, speak at a legal conference in February of 2012. The FBI responded to the request with pages of heavily redacted material<\/a>, leaving the questions posed by the ACLU unanswered.<\/p>\n

The FBI responded to the ACLU’s request for its interpretation of the\u00a0<\/span>United States v. Jones<\/span><\/span>\u00a0holding with pages of heavily redacted material.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One memo Weissman spoke of<\/a> examined the use of GPS tracking, including methods of such tracking on transportation besides cars, such as airplanes and boats, while the other focused on how the Jones<\/span> decision might apply to non-GPS evidence-gathering techniques. The memo entitled, \u201cGuidance Regarding the Application of United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012), to Additional Investigative Techniques<\/a>\u201d was turned over to the ACLU completely redacted. The other, \u201cGuidance Regarding the Application of United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012), to GPS Tracking Devices\u201d<\/a> is mostly redacted save a brief recap of the Supreme Court\u2019s holding.
\nCatherine Crump, Staff Attorney for the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project lamented<\/a> the secrecy, calling the Justice Department\u2019s decision \u201cunfortunate [as it] leaves Americans with no clear understanding of when we will be subjected to tracking\u2014possibly for months at a time\u2014or whether the government will first get a warrant.\u201d Americans do not know whether the Jones<\/span> holding requires a warrant from a judge in order to install a GPS tracking device on a car, or if other location tracking methods such as that of cell phones, drones, and license plates is permissible under the ruling. The ACLU believed the memos, which were authored with the FBI but originated in the Justice Department, to be helpful in answering these questions. Crump believes such secrecy should not exist in a democratic society, and that the government should tell Americans what its policies are.
\nThe ACLU insists<\/a>, \u201cAmericans have a strong interest in the disclosure of the Department of Justice memos,\u201d as it is worried that the government\u2019s interpretation of the Jones<\/span> ruling might stretch the Court\u2019s decision beyond that the Court intended, and because such secrecy inhibits Congress from engaging in informed policymaking regarding surveillance issues. Based on the headings in the memos themselves, the Justice Department believed the information within to be \u201cprivileged and confidential<\/a>.\u201d Whether answers to the questions posed by the ACLU about government surveillance and tracking methods are answered remains to be seen. The ACLU maintains<\/a> that it will continue to seek the release of the content of the memos, believing the content to be improperly withheld in light of the purpose it ascribes to the Freedom of Information Act \u2013 to \u201cmake sure that government doesn\u2019t operate under secret law.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday, January 17, 2013, by Anne Marie Tosco In January of 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously held that law enforcement could not put a warrantless GPS tracker on a suspect\u2019s car in United States v. Jones. Following the ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act compelling the …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7644,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/7644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}