new technology creates '1984' scenarios

The government is free to attach a GPS device to the car of any American and record that person’s public movements for a month or more without a warrant or suspicion of wrongdoing, a government lawyer told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Even the nine justices.

“You could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month. No problem under the Constitution?” asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

It is allowed under the court’s own precedents, replied Deputy Solicitor General Michael R. Dreeben, and is no different than if the FBI “put its team of surveillance agents around the clock on any individual and follow that individual’s movements as they went around on the public streets.”

But to many of the justices, something did seem different. In an intense hour-long exchange in which the Big Brother of George Orwell’s novel “1984” was referenced six times, the justices wondered how the dizzying pace of technology has changed a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

The justices pondered a world in which satellites can zero in on an individual’s house, cameras record the faces at a crowded intersection and individuals instantly announce their every movement to the world on Facebook. They wondered about the government placing tracking devices in overcoats or on license plates.

“How do we deal with this?” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked. “Do we just say, ‘Well, nothing is changed,’ so that all the information that people expose to the public is fair game?”

The court is trying to apply the Constitution’s centuries-old protection against unreasonable searches and seizures at a time when devices such as a GPS can essentially do police officers’ work for them.

The court, Dreeben said, has already settled the greater question: “What a person seeks to preserve as private in the enclave of his own home or in a private letter or inside of his vehicle when he is traveling is a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.”

He added: “But what he reveals to the world, such as his movements in a car on a public roadway, is not.”