Most of us have our whole lives on our cellphone. It’s completely safe,
right? Well, you may have thought wrong. It has been coming to light that now,
your cellphone can give your location away—to
the police. There is speculation that it may be OK for police officers to
tap into the GPS signal of people’s cellphones to track their locations. While
mostly used for crime, the most shocking aspect of this issue is that a search
warrant is not required to tap into this information—no permission is needed.
Many people jump to the conclusion that this idea is terrible. What
person would want their privacy to be unknowingly violated? As Americans,
privacy is a relevant issue that is never taken lightly—we were given the right
to it since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. It is generally known that
Americans are protected against unreasonable search and seizure. One side of
this controversy is that if people are being tracked unknowingly via cellphone
GPS without a warrant, such behavior
should count as an unreasonable search. In a recent case by the Supreme Court, USA v. Jones, the backstory was that a
GPS tracking device was attached to a suspect’s car (without a warrant) in
order to track his movements for four weeks, twenty-four hours a day. The
Supreme Court ruled that to physically attach a GPS tracker without a search
warrant was unconstitutional—a violation of the Fourth Amendment as it involved
the use of his car, a personal property. However, because the signals emitted
from our cellphone GPS are not our property, any cellphone with GPS can
potentially be legally tracked, which is scary to Americans.
Despite some of the inherent problems with law enforcement being able to
monitor the location of people via cellphone, there are also benefits to this access.
In a recent case of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the defendant
Skinner was tracked via his cellphone GPS for three days as he was driving.
When law enforcement finally found him stationary at a location, they searched
him and arrested him for being a drug courier. The blatant fact is that this
victory over crime would not have been as fast and efficient if cellphone GPS
tracking had not been used. Even the federal appeals court ruled that this is,
in fact, not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Here is another example that
this method of fighting crime can be beneficial:
The real question is whether or not the stigma of invasion of privacy is
dismissible in order to improve the efficiency of fighting crime via advanced technology
such as GPS on cellphones. Can we overlook the negatives and look into the
future of efficient crime fighting?
For me, I think that law enforcement can
be given this access as long as they strictly use it for crime. There
should be no abuse of power; the police better have a darn good reason for
tracking someone.
