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Privacy Rights in the Digital Age

United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012)

by Ethan P. Fallon

A unanimous decision, with a majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government's attachment of a Global Positioning System (GPS) device to a vehicle, and its use to monitor the vehicle's movements, constituted a search under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was initially developed for military use, but the U.S. government has now made the system available for civilian and commercial use. A GPS device calculates geographic location by receiving and analyzing satellite data, and it is commonly available for private use in cell phones and other electronic devices.

In this case, Antoine Jones, owner and operator of a Washington, DC, nightclub, came under suspicion of trafficking narcotics. A joint task force, consisting of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police, investigated Jones by visually monitoring his nightclub, installing a camera focused on the front entrance of his club, and employing a pen register and wiretap over his cell phone. The government subsequently obtained a search warrant authorizing the installation of a GPS tracking device on a vehicle driven by Jones, which was registered to his wife. The warrant authorized the installation of the device in the District of Columbia within ten days of its issuance.

Agents installed the GPS device on the eleventh day, however, and did so in the state of Maryland. The government tracked the vehicle's movements for the next twenty-eight days and once had to replace the device's battery in a public parking lot. The device established the vehicle's location within 50 to 100 feet, and it relayed more than 2,000 pages of data over the twenty-eight days of its use.

The government indicted Jones and his alleged co-conspirators with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine and fifty grams or more of cocaine base, in violation of federal law. Jones filed a pretrial motion to suppress the evidence obtained through the GPS device, arguing that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated. The district court granted his motion in part: with regard to the data collected while the vehicle was parked in his garage. The district court held, however, that the rest of the data was admissible because an individual traveling in a vehicle on public roadways had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

After his first trial resulted in a hung jury, the government charged Jones and his co-conspirators with the same conspiracy in a second indictment. The evidence obtained through the GPS device was also permitted in the second trial. This time, however, the jury found Jones guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed the conviction, holding that the use of the GPS tracking device violated Jones's Fourth Amendment rights. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

Justice Scalia first explained that a vehicle is an “effect” as the term is used in the text of the Fourth Amendment. Justice Scalia also underscored that the government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining personal information. Such intrusion, he explained, would have undoubtedly been considered a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was first adopted.

Justice Scalia acknowledged, however, that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence was no longer exclusively tied to common law trespass, noting that Justice Harlan's “reasonable expectation of privacy” approach first enunciated in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), came to dominate most Fourth Amendment cases. Nonetheless, the Court clarified that Katz's reasonable expectation of privacy approach simply augmented the common law trespassory test rather than displacing it. Therefore, because the government physically intruded into a constitutionally protected area by attaching a GPS device on Jones's vehicle and subsequently monitored its movements, a “search” occurred within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The government asserted that, even if its acts constituted a Fourth Amendment search, those acts were “reasonable” and therefore permissible. Justice Scalia rejected this argument, stating that the government waived this argument because it did not make it in front of the lower courts. Accordingly, the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the court of appeals.

While the Supreme Court was unanimous in affirming the judgment of the court of appeals, two justices wrote concurring opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote separately to highlight the difficulties in applying Fourth Amendment principles in the digital age, noting that it may be necessary to reconsider the notion that individuals do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when information is disclosed to third parties. Justice Sotomayor also suggested that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence should cease to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for having a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Justice Samuel Alito also wrote a separate concurrence, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan. Justice Alito rejected the trespassed-based rule and instead analyzed the case under the reasonable expectation of privacy test articulated in Katz. Under the Katz test, Jones had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle he drove. Therefore, Justice Alito agreed that the court of appeals should be affirmed.

Jones is a recent example of the U.S. Supreme Court's struggle to articulate Fourth Amendment standards in the face of emerging technologies. The case revived the old trespass-based rule that looks to whether the government physically intruded into a constitutionally protected area. Justice Sotomayor's concurrence suggests that the Court could begin to rethink some of its prior Fourth Amendment case law to better cope with the digital age.

Further Reading

1 

Easton, Richard D., and Eric F. Frazier. GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to

2 

Smartphones. Herndon, VA: Potomac Books, 2013.

3 

Priester, Benjamin J. “Five Answers and Three Questions After United States v. Jones (2012), the Fourth Amendment ‘GPS Case.’” Oklahoma Law Review 65 (2013): 491–532.

4 

Rosen, Jeffrey. “The Deciders: The Future of Privacy and Free Speech in the Age of Facebook and Google.” Fordham Law Review 80 (2012): 1525–1538.

See also: Constitutional law; Criminal justice (criminal procedure); Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; Katz v. United States; Supreme Court of the United States; Wiretapping

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Fallon, Ethan P. "United States V. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012)." Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PRDA_0219.
APA 7th
Fallon, E. P. (2016). United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012). In C. Anglim & JD (Ed.), Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Fallon, Ethan P. "United States V. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012)." Edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD. Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.