Robert Barnes, The Washington Post
It’s a wide, wired world out there, more so every day, and the Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to let law enforcement take advantage of it to build cases against the bad guys.
The administration wants the justices to overturn a decision last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that said police must get a warrant before launching a long-term surveillance of a suspect using a global positioning device attached to the man’s car.
In overturning the conviction of a D.C. nightclub owner accused of being a prominent cocaine kingpin, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said the appeals court decision was not faithful to a Supreme Court ruling that people have no expectation of privacy when traveling along public streets.
“Prompt resolution of this conflict is critically important to law enforcement efforts throughout the United States,” Katyal told the court in a petition asking them to take the case of United States v. Antoine Jones…
“This case is really going to confront the court with the problem of adopting the Fourth Amendment to a new information age,” said Daniel Prywes, a Washington lawyer who wrote a brief in the Jones case for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
