Note – Alito’s Way: Application of Justice Alito’s Concurring Opinion in United States v. Jones to Cell Phone Location Data

Authors

Ryan Birss

Abstract

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in United States v. Jones, ruling unanimously that the government’s installation of a GPS device on Antoine Jones’s vehicle and the use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements constituted a “search” and violated the Fourth Amendment. However, the majority opinion focused solely on the physical trespass of placing a device on a suspect’s car. Due to advancements in technology such as cell phone location data, physical intrusion is unnecessary for government officials to track an individual. The limitations of the opinion were immediately apparent in cases like United States v. Skinner, as government agents circumvented the holding in Jones by merely avoiding physical trespass. This Note argues that by focusing on Justice Alito’s concurrence in Jones and his three prongs of analysis (Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the length of tracking, and the type of offense) and analyzing cell phone location data as something a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in, courts can protect individuals from unchecked government intrusion. This Note recaps the three opinions in Jones, summarizes the current technology and the procedures used by government agencies to access cell phone location data, and uses the facts of Skinner to illustrate how the surveillance process works. This Note then discusses Justice Alito’s concurrence in detail and proposes several modifications to his analysis in order to clarify when the warrantless collection of cell phone data should be deemed

Recommended Citation

Ryan Birss, Note – Alito’s Way: Application of Justice Alito’s Concurring Opinion in United States v. Jones to Cell Phone Location Data, 65 Hastings L.J. 899 (2014).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol65/iss3/7