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Track Me Maybe: The Fourth Amendment And The Use Of Cell Phone Tracking To Facilitate Arrest, Jeremy H. Rothstein

Fordham Law Review

Police use of technology to locate and track criminal suspects has drawn increasing attention from courts, commentators, and the public. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that police installation of a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. Less attention has been paid to police tracking of cell phones—a far more common practice. Police can now locate a cell phone within several feet, using either GPS or information taken from cell towers.

In August 2011, the government asked a federal magistrate judge in Maryland to allow thirty days of …

Back To Katz: Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy In The Facebook Age, Haley Plourde-Cole

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Part I of this Note discusses the evolution of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in reaction to advancing technology, the Supreme Court and circuit courts’ disposition in dealing with electronic “beeper” tracking (the technology that predated GPS), and the legal doctrine governing the government’s use of cellular phones to conduct surveillance of individuals both retroactively and in real-time. Part II examines the developing split among the federal circuits and state courts over whether GPS surveillance of vehicles constitutes a search, as well as the parallel concerns raised in recent published opinions by magistrate judges as to whether government requests for cell-site information …