By James Vicini
January 23, 2012 3:08 PM EST
(REUTERS) -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police cannot put a GPS device on a suspect's car to track his movements without a warrant, a test case that upholds basic privacy rights in the face of new surveillance technology.
The high court ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration, which had argued that a warrant was not required to use global positioning system devices to monitor a vehicle on public streets.
The justices unanimously upheld a precedent-setting ruling by a U.S. appeals court that the police must first obtain a warrant to use a GPS device for an extended period of time to covertly follow a suspect.
The high court ruled that placement of a device on a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements was covered by U.S. constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures of evidence.
There are no precise statistics on how often police in the United States use GPS tracking in criminal investigations. But the Obama administration told the court last year it was used sparingly by federal law enforcement officials.
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The American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights group hailed the ruling as an important victory for privacy. "While this case turned on the fact that the government physically placed a GPS device on the defendant's car, the implications are much broader," Steven Shapiro of the ACLU said.
"A majority of the court acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives," he said.
SUSPECTED DRUG TRAFFICKER
The case began in 2005 when police officers went to a public parking lot in Maryland and secretly installed a GPS device on a Jeep Grand Cherokee used by a Washington, D.C. nightclub owner, Antoine Jones.
Jones was suspected of drug trafficking and the police tracked his movements for a month. The resulting evidence played a key role in his conviction for conspiring to distribute cocaine.
The appeals court had thrown out Jones's conviction and his
life-in-prison sentence, and ruled prolonged electronic monitoring of the vehicle amounted to a search.
All nine justices agreed in upholding the appeals court decision, but at least four justices would have gone even further in finding fault not only with the attachment of the device, but also with the lengthy monitoring.
In summarizing the court's majority opinion from the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia said attachment of the device by the police was a trespass and an improper intrusion of the kind that would have been considered a search when the Constitution was adopted some 220 years ago.
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