From our legal desk, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering arguments over police use of high tech surveillance equipment, that is, GPS devices. It isn’t a question of whether cops can use GPS to track people. The question is whether they must get a warrant by proving they have a good legal reason to track someone before they do. Lawyer Walter Dellinger explains, “If the Supreme Court gave a green light [to warrantless GPS tracking, then] any officer can install any GPS device for any reason on anybody’s car, even if the officer thinks it would be interesting to know where Supreme Court justices go at night when they leave the courthouse. No one would be immune from having a GPS device installed on their vehicles.”

At first, I thought, no officer is going to recklessly tag and track cars, because the department resources would be too much. But then I wondered if it could happen in a small town, where the police department has only a few people. A power-hungry sheriff might start tagging and tracking as many people as he could buy devices for.

But there is a clear alternative. If the courts declare warrantless GPS tracking violates the amendment forbidding reckless search and seizure, police can develop their squad car cloaking shields and officer invisibility coats. That way they can follow suspects until they have reasonable … Oh, the courts will step in here, won’t they, saying you can’t follow someone while invisible unless you get a warrant. Of course, how will they know, eh?