Thomas Peele
A legal case with implications that some say spring straight from the pages of George Orwell's "1984" is headed to the Supreme Court in November, and its outcome could have a major impact on one of the Bay Area's biggest murder cases in the past decade.
The case pits constitutional rights of privacy and protection from unfair police tactics against high-tech government surveillance. It has already drawn analogies to the "Big Brother"-type government intrusion Orwell envisioned in his novel.
Critics of the warrantless tracking say that without checks, police could routinely monitor everyone's location, all the time. Others say police are already free to conduct surveillance by simply following people around, and there is no legal difference between trailing someone by car or on foot and using technology to, in effect, do the same thing.
"We don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when we are out on public streets," said Anthony Barkow, director of the Center for the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University Law School. "Police can do it without technology. This (case) is just sexier because it is high tech."
Earlier this year, evidence from a tracking device installed without [...]
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