(Washington, D.C.)—The Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect Americans from sweeping government searches, and that protection does not disappear just because someone earns a living in a regulated industry. The Liberty Justice Center filed an amicus brief supporting petitioner Frank Thompson in Thompson v. Wilson, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to grant review and reverse a First Circuit decision allowing the Maine Department of Marine Resources to impose continuous GPS surveillance on lobstermen’s vessels without any opportunity for precompliance review by a neutral decisionmaker.
The case concerns a state-imposed monitoring regime that requires lobstermen to submit to round-the-clock location tracking—an intrusion the brief argues is broader in scope, duration and invasiveness than the “writs of assistance” that helped spark the American Revolution and led directly to the Fourth Amendment’s ratification.
The Liberty Justice Center’s brief explains that while the Court has recognized limited exceptions to the warrant requirement, those exceptions were never meant to authorize “boundless and unfettered surveillance.” Continuous GPS monitoring, the brief argues, is the functional equivalent of the government being able to “board” a vessel at all times, generating a detailed chronicle of a person’s movements in a way the Court has repeatedly recognized as uniquely revealing.
“The Founders launched a revolution to escape far less invasive breaches of privacy than those permitted by the First Circuit here,” said Katie Cosgrove, Counsel at Liberty Justice Center. “To allow a narrowly defined warrant exception to be expanded to this scope—and without any opportunity for precompliance review by a neutral decisionmaker—flies in the face of Supreme Court precedent and our nation’s history of safeguarding citizens’ privacy.”
The Liberty Justice Center also noted that the Fourth Amendment’s protections must keep pace with the government’s increasing capacity to intrude upon private life. Liberty Justice Center warns that allowing continuous GPS tracking as a condition of working would dramatically expand warrant exceptions beyond their intended limits.
The Liberty Justice Center’s amicus brief in Thompson v. Wilson can be found here.