Supreme Court confirms we are still living in the United States: search warrant required to stick a GPS device on someone's car and follow it in and out of public and private places

Here's an idea: stick a GPS on someone's car and track their every movement.

And how about this one: do this without getting a warrant.

That's what the police did to track the movement of drug trafficker Antoine Jones, and their shortcut around the United States constitution is probably going to cost them a conviction.

In a moment of startling sanity and agreement, the Supreme Court today ruled unanimously that police must obtain a search warrant before using a GPS device to track criminal suspects.

According to Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, as he often seems to do on Fourth Amendment cases, said:

We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’ ” under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures

Nothing terribly surprising here. When you stick something onto someone's car and follow them around in and out of public places, that violates a person's privacy. To do this, you have to get a search warrant. And Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion, as he often does on related subjects.

Not too different from United States v. Knotts, in which the Supreme Court decided that putting a beeper inside someone's car and following it around for a while, including monitoring it while it is parked in someone's private garage violated a person's Fourth Amendment right. Although that was a beeper that worked based on the strength of a radio transmission, it's really not all that different.

So, what can I say? Kudos to the Supreme Court? Thanks for helping me feel a little more like I'm still living in the United States? Nice job, Scalia, writing an opinion I can actually agree with?

I'll figure that out after I breath my sigh of relief.