This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 20, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown. Privacy and technology are often at odds and how courts handle that

will be dealt with in a pair of upcoming cases at the Supreme Court.

It could have huge implications for government snooping.

Jim Harper, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, argues the vast amount of information carried

by modern mobile technology demands legal

justification for searching those items. The Supreme Court has been for

some years now working to reconcile the protections of the Fourth Amendment with the advent of new technology.

And it's clear that they want to see that privacy is not eroded by new technology, but they don't necessarily know how.

So we've been briefing the court, including in the Jones decision,

which came down in January of 2012,

that case dealt with whether law enforcement could place a GPS device

on a car and track it for four weeks straight, generating 2,000 pages of information

about the movement of the car without a warrant.

The court unanimously held that law enforcement cannot do that, but they were divided as to reasoning.

The majority opinion written by Justice Scalia focused on the use of the car, that is the attachment

of the device to the car in combination with the tracking. That was a search that required a warrant.

Justice Alito wrote for a four-member concurrence saying that that didn't make any sense but the reasonable expectation of

privacy test would apply and it was unreasonable for for government to do this

it invaded a reasonable expectation of privacy for government to do all these things.

The court is going to continue to grapple with these issues in a pair of upcoming cases to be argued

in April.

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