Obama Admin thinks warrantless GPS tracking A-OK

[Phantasee]

AP:

High Court Troubled By Warrantless GPS Tracking

by The Associated Press

WASHINGTON November 8, 2011, 03:01 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court invoked visions of an all-seeing Big Brother and satellites watching us from above. Then things got personal Tuesday when the justices were told police could slap GPS devices on their cars and track their movements, without asking a judge for advance approval.

The occasion for all the talk about intrusive police actions was a hearing in a case about whether the police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The outcome could have implications for other high-tech surveillance methods as well.

The justices expressed deep reservations about warrantless GPS tracking. But there also was no clear view about how or whether to regulate police use of the devices.

The justices were taken aback when the lawyer representing the government said police officers could install GPS devices on the justices' cars and track their movements without a warrant. To get a warrant, investigators need to convince a judge that there is reason to believe a suspect is involved in criminal activity.

"So your answer is yes, 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?" Chief Justice John Roberts said.

Not only that, government lawyer Michael Dreeben replied, but FBI agents wouldn't need a warrant either if they wanted to rummage through the justices' trash, use a low-tech beeper to track them or tail them around-the-clock with a team of agents. Dreeben said the court has previously ruled that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in those circumstances.

Justice Samuel Alito captured the essence of the court's concern when he said, "With computers around, it's now so simple to amass an enormous amount of information. How do we deal with this? Just say nothing has changed?"

Justice Stephen Breyer alluded to George Orwell's novel "1984" when he said surveillance in the past depended on human beings and their sometimes flawed memories. But computers don't have that problem, he said.

"The question that I think people are driving at, at least as I understand it and certainly share the concern, is that if you win this case then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States," Breyer said.

Roberts drew a comparison with artwork to explain his perception of the power of GPS surveillance. "You're talking about the difference between seeing a little tile and a mosaic," Roberts said.

But Dreeben said it would be better for lawmakers rather than judges to set limits. Dreeben said the concerns expressed Tuesday were similar to those in the earlier high court case. Thirty years ago, Dreeben said, "Beeper technology seemed extraordinarily advanced."

The court shouldn't make special rules for GPS devices just because they allow the police to be more efficient in capturing and analyzing data, Dreeben said.

GPS devices are especially useful in early stages of an investigation, when they can eliminate the use of time-consuming stakeouts as officers seek to gather evidence, he said.

The issue arose after the federal appeals court in Washington threw out the drug conspiracy conviction of nightclub owner Antoine Jones. FBI agents and local police did not have a valid search warrant when they installed a GPS device on Jones' car and collected travel information for a month.

The GPS device helped authorities link Jones to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned the conviction. The appellate judges said the authorities should have had a warrant and pointed to the length of the surveillance as a factor in their decision.

For all the unease the justices voiced in questions to Dreeben, they seemed equally torn in questions to Stephen Leckar, Jones' lawyer, about how to impose limits on the police.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked whether the use of video surveillance cameras is so different from getting information from a GPS device on a car. In London, Justice Elena Kagan noted, cameras are everywhere.

"It's pretty scary," Leckar said.

Justice Antonin Scalia responded with evident sarcasm. "Well, it must be unconstitutional if it's scary," Scalia said.

More gently, Breyer pointed out that English authorities have used video footage to prevent terrorist attacks.

The point of the questioning was to get Leckar to offer a principled way to draw a line that would still allow police to do their jobs without compromising people's rights.

Leckar said perhaps police could use the GPS device to follow someone for one day or one trip, without first getting a warrant. But that didn't appear to satisfy much of the court, either.

An unusual array of interest groups backs Jones, including the Gun Owners of America, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Civil Liberties Union and an association of truck drivers. The groups say GPS technology is much more powerful than the beeper technology police once employed in surveillance.

Other appeals courts have ruled that search warrants aren't necessary for GPS tracking.

The justices are considering two related issues, whether a warrant is needed before installing the device or using the GPS technology to track a vehicle. They could determine that the installation requires a warrant, leaving the knottier issues relating to tracking to another day.

A decision should come by spring.

The case is U.S. v. Jones, 10-1259.

Wired:

Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV
By Kim Zetter | November 8, 2011 | 5:30 am

As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently.

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

But little is known about how or how often law enforcement agents use them. And without a clear ruling requiring agents to obtain a “probable cause” warrant to use the devices, it leaves citizens who may have only a distant connection to a crime or no connection at all vulnerable to the whimsy of agents who are fishing for a case.

The invasive technology, for example, allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked.

“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts,” wrote U.S. Appeals Court Judge Douglas Ginsburg in a recent ruling that the Supreme Court will be examining this week to determine if warrants should be required for use with trackers.

Greg says he discovered the first tracker on his vehicle after noticing what looked like a cell phone antenna inside a hole on his back bumper where a cable is stored for towing a trailer. The device, the size of a mobile phone, was not attached to a battery pack, suggesting the battery was embedded in its casing.

A week later when he was back in San Jose, he checked the device, and it appeared to have been repositioned slightly on the vehicle to make it less visible. It was placed on the underside of the car in the wheel well that holds a spare tire.

Greg, a Hispanic American who lives in San Jose at the home of his girlfriend’s parents, contacted Wired after reading a story published last year about an Arab-American citizen named Yasir Afifi who found a tracking device on his car. Greg wanted to know what he should do with the device.

Afifi believed he was being tracked by authorities for six months before a mechanic discovered the device on his car when he took it into a garage for an oil change. He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security. Afifi has filed a suit against the government, asserting that authorities violated his civil liberties by placing the device on his vehicle without a warrant and without suspicion of a crime. His attorney, Zahra Billoo, told Wired this week that she’s requested a stay in her client’s case, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court in the GPS tracking case now before it.

Greg’s surveillance appears to involve different circumstances. It most likely involves a criminal drug investigation centered around his cousin, a Mexican citizen who fled across the border to that country a year ago and may have been involved in the drug trade as a dealer.

“He took off. I think he was fleeing. I think he committed a crime,” Greg told Wired.com, asserting that he himself is not involved in drugs.

Greg says he bought the SUV from his cousin in June, paying cash for it to a family member. He examined the car at the time and found no tracking device on it. A month later, he drove his cousin’s wife to Tijuana. Greg says he remained in Mexico a couple of days before returning to the U.S.

It’s possible the surveillance began shortly after his return, but Greg discovered the device only about three weeks ago during his visit to Modesto. The device was slipped into a sleeve that contained small magnets to affix it to the car.

On Tuesday, Nov. 1, Wired photographer Jon Snyder went to San Jose to photograph the device. The next day, two males and one female appeared suddenly at the business where Greg’s girlfriend works, driving a Crown Victoria with tinted windows. A witness reported to Greg that one of the men jumped out of the car, bent under the front of the girlfriend’s car for a few seconds, then jumped back into the Crown Victoria and drove off. Wired was unable to confirm the story.

The following day, Greg noticed that the GPS tracker on his own car had been replaced with a different tracker, this one encased in a clam shell cover attached to a large round magnet to hold the device to the car. The device was attached to a 3.6 VDC Lithium Polymer rechargeable battery.

There was no writing on the tracker to identify its maker, but a label on the battery indicated that it’s sold by a small firm in Farmingdale, New York, called Revanche. A notice on a government web site last June indicates that it was seeking 500 of the batteries and 250 battery chargers for the Drug Enforcement Administration. A separate notice on the same site in 2008 refers to a contract for what appears to be a similar Revanche battery. The notice indicates the batteries work with GPS devices made by Nextel and Sendum.

A spokeswoman with the DEA’s office in San Francisco, however, declined to say if the device on Greg’s vehicle was theirs.

“We cannot comment on our means or methods that we use, so I cannot provide you with any additional information,” said DEA spokeswoman Casey McEnry.

The second device on Greg’s vehicle appears to be a Sendum PT200 GPS tracker with the factory battery swapped out and replaced with the Revanche battery. The Sendum GPS tracker is marketed to private investigators, law enforcement and transportation security managers and sells for about $430 without the battery. With the factory battery “it will last 7-15 days reporting every hour in a good cellular coverage zone,” according to marketing literature describing it, and it uses CDMA cellular communications and gpsOne location services to determine its location.

When this reporter drove down to meet Greg and photograph the second tracker with photographer Snyder, three police cars appeared at the location that had been pre-arranged with Greg, at various points driving directly behind me without making any verbal contact before leaving.

After moving the photo shoot to a Rotten Robbie gas station a mile away from the first location, another police car showed up. In this case, the officer entered the station smiling at me and turned his car around to face the direction of Greg’s car, a couple hundred yards away. He remained there while the device was photographed. A passenger in the police car, dressed in civilian clothes, stepped out of the vehicle to fill a gas container, then the two left shortly before the photo shoot was completed.

The Obama administration will be defending the warrantless use of such trackers in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning. The administration, which is attempting to overturn a lower court ruling that threw out a drug dealer’s conviction over the warrantless use of a tracker, argues that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices.

It’s unclear if authorities obtained a warrant to track Greg’s vehicle. While Greg says he’s committed no crimes and has nothing to hide, the not-so-stealthy police maneuver at his girlfriend’s place of employment makes it look to others like she’s involved in something nefarious, he says. That concerns him.

It concerns attorney Billoo as well.

“For a lot of us, it’s like, Well I’m not selling cocaine, so let them put a tracking device on the car of [a suspect] who is selling cocaine,” Billoo says. “And I’m not a terrorist, so let them put the device on someone [suspected of being] a terrorist. But it shouldn’t be unchecked authority on the part of police officers. If law enforcement doesn’t care to have their authority checked, then we’re in a lot of trouble.”

[Kamakazie Sith]

I imagine that their logic is; there is nothing illegal from a police officer following you when you're in public. Though in the interest of civil liberities I think that a warrant should be secured.

[Gaidin]

I imagine that their logic is; there is nothing illegal from a police officer following you when you're in public. Though in the interest of civil liberities I think that a warrant should be secured.

That is pretty much their logic. They view it as basically an electronic stakeout, and the justification required is in the resources spent, not the invasion of privacy as they're not entering your home or actually searching your car or something where the courts have ruled you have an expected right of privacy. The court of course has the prerogative to change this if I'm not mistaken. It should be interesting.

[TheHammer]

I think the clear line of demarcation should be when they are attaching devices to privately owned property. That's where the analogy of a Police Officer legally observing someone in public breaks down. I would think that if someone were worth following that they would be able to afford an officer to do so, or obtain a warrant to have a tracking device planted on their vehicle.

[Phantasee]

That's basically it, I think. Devoting an officer and associated resources (like a car, fuel, etc) to follow someone requires justification, but sticking a GPS is much cheaper and now you don't even have that minimum justification to the bean counters to prevent excessive use or abuse.

[Terralthra]

Precedent for the case would seem to be US v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984), in which it was held that use of a beeper to track an item being moved on private property constituted an illegal search without a warrant. 24/7 warrantless GPS tracking is simply guaranteed to fall afoul of this decision. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) is also relevant, as is the District Court decision in ACLU v. NSA, 493 F.3d 644 (6th Cir. 2007) regarding warrantless wiretapping. The 6th Circuit dismissed the case for lack of proof of standing, but in the GPS case, that's not an issue, as the appellant has clear standing.

[evilsoup]

So, if the logic is that the car is always in public areas and so doesn't need a warrant; does that mean that bugging someone with a garage would require a warrant? Or is it only important where the GPS tracker is placed (so long as you place it while the vehicle is on the street, that's fine)? If there is a double standard for (generally wealthier) people who have garages and those who do not, that's a pretty disturbing implication.

EDIT: damn, ninja'd: so a car that's left on the street overnight (so not in a driveway or garage) would be allowed to be tapped?

[Terralthra]

So, if the logic is that the car is always in public areas and so doesn't need a warrant; does that mean that bugging someone with a garage would require a warrant? Or is it only important where the GPS tracker is placed (so long as you place it while the vehicle is on the street, that's fine)? If there is a double standard for (generally wealthier) people who have garages and those who do not, that's a pretty disturbing implication.

EDIT: damn, ninja'd: so a car that's left on the street overnight (so not in a driveway or garage) would be allowed to be tapped?

A warrantlessly-tracked car would have to never enter private property. As soon as it did, the tracking becomes a search, and impermissible on 4th Amendment grounds without a warrant. And frankly, if you can't be bothered to phone up a city/county judge and convince him you have probable cause to track a car for criminal activity, you shouldn't be tracking the car. Judges like giving warrants, all TV depictions aside, and correspondingly dislike suppressing evidence. It would take five minutes to phone up a judge and have him sign and fax a warrant if you have probable cause. That police forces are not is indicative of the general level of evidence they're using to plant these GPS devices - scarce and threadbare.

[evilsoup]

Okay. But would the car going onto private property invalidate the whole tracking process as far as the law goes; or would it just be that evidence from while the car is on private property that would be inadmissible?

[Gaidin]

Precedent for the case would seem to be US v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984), in which it was held that use of a beeper to track an item being moved on private property constituted an illegal search without a warrant. 24/7 warrantless GPS tracking is simply guaranteed to fall afoul of this decision. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) is also relevant, as is the District Court decision in ACLU v. NSA, 493 F.3d 644 (6th Cir. 2007) regarding warrantless wiretapping. The 6th Circuit dismissed the case for lack of proof of standing, but in the GPS case, that's not an issue, as the appellant has clear standing.

I think they'd probably argue that unless the driver takes it past the garage or driveway, and you know...through a wall into a house, they get nothing other than what they'd get from a normal stakeout. That is, hey, the car is home. Not being a lawyer, I have no clue how they'd argue it, but it seems in the end to be different in execution than sticking (effectively) a transponder onto an item that that can be tracked on private property. SCOTUS in fact said it didn't constitute a search and seizure until they used it to track on private property, where this they wouldn't get any further than 'yea it's on private property'(in a garage or on a driveway). Not a big thing until you're looking at the person with a multi acre estate, and where he parks on the estate would actually be relevant.

[Karrick]

What would happen if someone discovers a strange GPS device on their car, removes it and takes a sledgehammer to it? Does this person get slapped with some kind of charge for destroying federal (or police) property? It would seem like a reasonable argument that, warrant or not, this thing is attached to someone's private property and left there unattended so they can do with it what they will.

[Simon_Jester]

What I dislike most about this is the ease of doing fishing expeditions- you can put trackers on the cars of "the usual suspects" and just never stop tracking them. There's not much cost associated with doing that, and if evidence obtained from "we decided to slap a GPS tracker on his car because we didn't like the cut of his jib" becomes admissible in court, it puts a big dent in people's privacy.

On top of which, putting a GPS tracker on a man's car is a premeditated, preplanned action; there should be time to get a warrant. This is not like the police seeing something suspicious on the street and needing to react faster than they can get permission from a judge.

[Alyeska]

GPS tracking a car can do things the police won't.

You can track trends and identify a huge amount about someone's personal life. And the Police want the power to do this without any oversight what so ever.

You can look at the places someone frequents and identify personal things about their life. Things that can only be determined through 24/7 surveillance. It can be used to paint a very intimate picture of someones life. Very private things can be learned simply by correlating where you go. And they claim they can learn this simply by using a GPS with absolutely no manpower cost and absolutely no oversight.

I would say 24/7 survelience should be worth the cost to the police. What resources does it cost to physically tail someone? Thats what GPS will cost.

[White Haven]

Key point here, the model detailed in one of the OP posts only phones home once an hour. On one hand, that makes it very hard to track via conventional signal-tracing anti-surveillance measures. At the same time, it also means that these things are literally incapable of being used in any sort of hot-pursuit situation that could even begin to justify their use without a warrant. They're deliberately designed to be useless in realtime suspect tracking, or at least the one that's been researched is. To me, that pokes all manner of holes in the 'we don't want to get warrants to use this' argument.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The basic queasy thing here is that, like was said, judges love handing out search warrants at the drop of a hat. There's really no public interest not pressing, especially since in an urgent case a five minute phone call to a judge can produce a legal warrant.

[Gaidin]

That's the point. They're not designed for hot pursuit situations. They're designed to give them the style of information that, up until now, there has been no question about whether the police needed the warrant. They're designed in such a way that they can point the design and say 'look, we can't have used it for this questionable situation, it only gives a signal every hour. We can't track him by it that easily. Even now there is no question on whether they need a warrant to obtain the information this gives them. The question is whether they need a warrant to obtain it that easily.

[Simon_Jester]

Problems with that, Gaijin:

One is that I'm not sure a Supreme Court ruling could allow this device without also allowing other devices that do exactly what you don't want. It's very hard to say that it's constitutional for a device to report your position every hour but not every half hour, or every ten minutes... or every five. Viewed uncharitably, these are foot-in-the-door tactics, the police trying to get an excuse to use much more extensive GPS monitoring of your whereabouts out of a ruling over less extensive monitoring.

Another is that, yes, there is no need for warrantless installation of these devices. It's trivially easy to get a warrant to do something like this, so I don't understand why police would want to avoid it, unless they're trying to engage in fishing expeditions or avoid a paper trail that might raise awkward questions about how they singled someone out for suspicion in the first place. Neither of which is legitimate.

Remember, you can pitch nearly any police bugging as "just makes the job easier." Police could listen in on your conversations without planting microphones; it's just harder and riskier and more time-intensive... but that doesn't mean they're allowed to plant bugs anywhere they're legally allowed to stand and listen.

[Gaidin]

Problems with that, Gaijin:

One is that I'm not sure a Supreme Court ruling could allow this device without also allowing other devices that do exactly what you don't want. It's very hard to say that it's constitutional for a device to report your position every hour but not every half hour, or every ten minutes... or every five. Viewed uncharitably, these are foot-in-the-door tactics, the police trying to get an excuse to use much more extensive GPS monitoring of your whereabouts out of a ruling over less extensive monitoring.

Another is that, yes, there is no need for warrantless installation of these devices. It's trivially easy to get a warrant to do something like this, so I don't understand why police would want to avoid it, unless they're trying to engage in fishing expeditions or avoid a paper trail that might raise awkward questions about how they singled someone out for suspicion in the first place. Neither of which is legitimate.

Remember, you can pitch nearly any police bugging as "just makes the job easier." Police could listen in on your conversations without planting microphones; it's just harder and riskier and more time-intensive... but that doesn't mean they're allowed to plant bugs anywhere they're legally allowed to stand and listen.

Don't get me wrong Simon, I'm not disagreeing here. Not fully anyway. I'm just pointing out, given the leaps some posts make, that the information they actually get from the (dissected) device, they get from tailing someone for as long as they please. Which no court in the world can stop them from doing short of an outrageous interpretation of the fourth amendment that I doubt would be taken any time soon.

Now, if they wanted to they could specify differences between devices in some way. They've done it before to an extent, though only in generalities for any time something remotely related(interpretively) has come up. And then as a guide for the lower courts mostly. Basically the jump I'm making is the definition of what one device is designed for vs another for the lower courts use in future cases wouldn't be too different conceptually from the definition of art vs porn.

As for warrantless installation. I guess my question is are they really avoiding it? Has it really come up before now in a case to make what will inevatably be a far-ranging result? If they had to do it, legally, you'd probably be right. They'd have no problem doing it. But for the most part I'm not aware of this ever being legally required, and such a lack of requirement being questioned to this extent.

[Terralthra]

US v. Karo is the closest precedent I can find, and found that a warrant was required.

[Gaidin]

US v. Karo is the closest precedent I can find, and found that a warrant was required.

And they specifically said it was required for tracking on private property. Tracking on roads and/or public property is presumably alright. Even so, they'd probably argue that they'd just have to drop the data they obtained while he was on private property.

[Terralthra]

US v. Karo is the closest precedent I can find, and found that a warrant was required.

And they specifically said it was required for tracking on private property. Tracking on roads and/or public property is presumably alright. Even so, they'd probably argue that they'd just have to drop the data they obtained while he was on private property.

Perhaps, but Fruit of the Poisoned Tree says that not only could they not use tracking data from private property, they wouldn't be able to obtain search warrants based on that data either (cf. Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920)). The SCOTUS is unlikely to be willing to grant warrantless tracking when the requirements for the use of tracking requires enough judicial oversight (and stands a great possibility of having evidence suppressed or if its use results in successful appeals and overturned convictions) that a warrant would be more expedient and consistent with the 4th Amendment to begin with.

[Gaidin]

Perhaps, but Fruit of the Poisoned Tree says that not only could they not use tracking data from private property, they wouldn't be able to obtain search warrants based on that data either (cf. Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920)). The SCOTUS is unlikely to be willing to grant warrantless tracking when the requirements for the use of tracking requires enough judicial oversight (and stands a great possibility of having evidence suppressed or if its use results in successful appeals and overturned convictions) that a warrant would be more expedient and consistent with the 4th Amendment to begin with.

And yet if they're doing this to find potential hangout spots in places like bars or restaurants and has nothing whatsoever to do with the home or other private places, Fruit of the Poisoned Tree is a moot point anyway isn't it? Places of dealing aren't useful unless they seriously last an hour(which I doubt). Public places where they hang out, typically likely for more than an hour? More useful, and more likely to be the target information. I think it would all come down to device they're using personally. Real time, I'd be against without a warrant. Hourly ping, not so much.

[Alyeska]

This is an argument someone made about constant GPS monitoring.

Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar, or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one‘s not visiting any of these places over the course of a month. The sequence of a person‘s movements can reveal still more; a single trip to a gynecologist‘s office tells little about a woman, but that trip followed a few weeks later by a visit to a baby supply store tells a different story. A person who knows all of another‘s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.

It can reveal massive quantities of extremely private information. Just follow someone for a single month and you can learn a lot about them.

The police want GPS monitoring because its legal to follow a car without a warrant. I say the value of the GPS is the cost of following a vehicle without a warrant. What sort of resources would it cost to track a car for 24 hours a day for an entire month? That is the justified cost police have to pay in one fashion or another. The ability to compile massive quantities of data about people with absolutely no oversight is appalling.

There is no counter to GPS tracking. Theoretically you can spot the police and take steps to avoid being seen. But there is nothing to avoid GPS short of physically inspecting every inch of your car every single day. With GPS there is absolutely no privacy. And it will track people on private property. Which is already illegal. It is indiscriminate and the sheer volume of data should be incredibly worrying.

[Terralthra]

Perhaps, but Fruit of the Poisoned Tree says that not only could they not use tracking data from private property, they wouldn't be able to obtain search warrants based on that data either (cf. Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920)). The SCOTUS is unlikely to be willing to grant warrantless tracking when the requirements for the use of tracking requires enough judicial oversight (and stands a great possibility of having evidence suppressed or if its use results in successful appeals and overturned convictions) that a warrant would be more expedient and consistent with the 4th Amendment to begin with.

And yet if they're doing this to find potential hangout spots in places like bars or restaurants and has nothing whatsoever to do with the home or other private places, Fruit of the Poisoned Tree is a moot point anyway isn't it? Places of dealing aren't useful unless they seriously last an hour(which I doubt). Public places where they hang out, typically likely for more than an hour? More useful, and more likely to be the target information. I think it would all come down to device they're using personally. Real time, I'd be against without a warrant. Hourly ping, not so much.

Using GPS tracking of a suspected drug dealer's car to find public places where they hang out is quite possibly the least efficient way to do that. The way you'd find out that they're a suspected drug dealer is that you'd observe them hanging out at suspected public locations engaged in suspicious behavior. Once you've done that, you can easily get a warrant to track the car, search the car, occupant, or occupant/owner's residence.

Once again, I fall back on the established precedent: getting a warrant is the first and most important line of defense against civil liberties violations. If you can't get a warrant to track a car, that means the officer in question has no probable cause at all. If the officer had probable cause, a warrant can be issued, and tracking a car with "once an hour" pings is the sort of non-exigency, non-"inevitable discovery" for which the SCOTUS has consistently decided a warrant is necessary. If there's not enough for a warrant, the officers initiating the tracking literally have only "that guy/car looks shady." That way lies racial profiling and a host of other discriminatory practices.

[Edi]

GPS tracking by remote device is essentially no different than installing hidden mikes or monitoring software on a computer, because it is remote covert information gathering about private activities. That would suggest that it should require a warrant, especially since a warrant is easy for police to secure if they can show any kind of actual cause. If they can't, they have no business doing remote surveillance on a person anyway.

As well, covertly installing tracking devices without a warrant is interfering with private property, which should be protected from arbitrary tampering by the authorities without showing cause.

I wonder what would happen if a private citizen or organization began doing surveillance of e.g. public officials or private citizens in a similar manner and got caught doing it. Still legal?