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Government Surveillance

Amicus Brief Asking Court to Rehear US v. Skinner Location Tracking Case

This brief as the court to grant rehearing of the case because the majority opinion is wrongly decided in light of United States v. Jones. The panel majority opinion is an unusually important and weighty precedent given its status as the first appellate decision in the nation to apply Jones to GPS tracking via cell phones and severely undercuts the Jones decision by effectively limiting it to its facts.

While Jones places constitutional restrictions on the ability of the police to track the location of a car using GPS, the Sixth Circuit has now held that agents can engage in even more intrusive surveillance of cell phones without implicating the Fourth Amendment at all.

This Court should grant rehearing so the important issues in this case can be more thoroughly considered.