The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the high court of Massachusetts today to protect the rights of passengers in cars that law enforcement are tracking with GPS surveillance technology, arguing that both the driver and the passenger of a car have legal standing to challenge the collection of sensitive location data gathered by the GPS devices.
In Commonwealth v. Rousseau, police obtained a search warrant to install a GPS device on a car owned by a suspect in a number of arsons throughout the state. Ultimately, the owner of the car and his frequent passenger – Rousseau – were charged with a number of crimes, but both moved to challenge the search warrant. They argued that the police had made material misrepresentations in obtaining the search warrant, and as a result the GPS evidence should be excluded from the trial.
Although the trial court agreed that police had misrepresented the facts in order to get the search warrant, it upheld it anyway.
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