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fbi-use-of-global-postioning-system-gps-tracking — Part 01
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Jones's movements 24 hours a day for 28 days as he moved among scores of places,
thereby discovering the totality and pattern of his movements from place to place to
place.
2. Were Jones's locations exposed to the public?
*10 As the Supreme Court observed in Kyllo, the " Katz test-whether the individual
has an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable-has often.
been criticized as circular, and hence subjective and unpredictable.' 533 U.S. at 34.
Indeed, the Court has invoked various and varying considerations in applying the test.
See O'Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709, 715 (1987) (We have no talisman that
determines in all cases those privacy expectation that society is prepared to accept as
reasonable") (O'Connor, J., plurality opinion); Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 143 n.12.
(1978) (legitimation of expectations of privacy must have a source outside the Fourth
Amendment," such as "understandings that are recognized or permitted by society"). This
much is clear, however: Whether an expectation of privacy is reasonable depends in large.
part upon whether that expectation relates to information that has been "expose[d] to the.
public," Katz, 389 U.S. at 351.
Two considerations persuade us the information the police discovered in this case-the
totality of Jones's movements over the course of a month-was not exposed to the public:
First, unlike one's movements during a single journey, the whole of one's movements
over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood
anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil. Second, the whole of one's
movements is not exposed constructively even though each individual movement is
exposed, because that whole reveals more-sometimes a great deal more-than does the
sum of its parts.
a. Actually exposed?
The holding in Knotts flowed naturally from the reasoning in Katz: "What a person
knowingly exposes to the public ... is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection,*
389 U.S. at 351. See Knotts, 460 U.S. at 281-82 (movements observed by police were
"voluntarily conveyed to anyone who wanted to look"). The Government argues the same
reasoning applies here as well. We first consider the precedent governing our analysis of
whether the subject of a purported search has been exposed to the public, then hold the
information the police discovered using the GPS device was not so exposed..
(i). Precedent
The Government argues Jones's movements over the course of a month were actually
exposed to the public because the police lawfully could have followed Jones everywhere
13
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