This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 30, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown. The federal judge says police can attach GPS devices to your vehicle and track your every movement in that vehicle without a warrant.

So how are we to think about being secure

against unreasonable searches and seizures

when our every movement might be legally tracked

without court approval?

Cato Institute Research Fellow Julian Sanchez argues it's time to rethink our notions of personal

security and government surveillance.

We have two interesting cases from the last month involving the government's power to track you

using GPS technology without a warrant. There is a decision out of the Ninth Circuit that held

that the government didn't need a warrant even though they had snuck onto the

property of their target, the curtilage of the property, a traditionally protected area

to plant a GPS device on the target's car.

And the court ruled that it was not really a search when they snuck on to plant the device

and that moreover it was not a search when they then used that device to track

the target's motions.

And that was actually pretty consistent with existing precedent.

Judge Alex Kaczynski of the Ninth Circuit wrote a sort of blistering dissent from the refusal to rehear the case on bank with the full panel of judges but he

focused a lot on the idea that this was trimming back the traditional right of

privacy in the curtilage of the home, your driveway, the sort of surrounding area.

But there's a couple cases out of the 70s, knots and Caro that traditionally have drawn the distinction between

location tracking and public and location tracking in private.

And so the traditional idea was if you have a tracking device,

...