From Jones to Drones: The Fight to Restrain Law Enforcement Tech

If the police secretly crawl beneath your car in the middle of the night and attach a magnetic GPS tracking beacon, have they violated your constitutional rights—and how did an 18th-century property rule written for horses and carriages reshape modern digital privacy? In 2004, federal agents investigating nightclub owner Antoine Jones covertly attached a GPS receiver to his Jeep and tracked his movements 24/7 for 28 continuous days. The surveillance yielded over 2,000 pages of tracking logs, leading to a stash house with 97 kilograms of cocaine and a life sentence. But because police violated the terms of their warrant, the case escalated to the Supreme Court. In this episode of reWandt, we deconstruct the landmark ruling United States v. Jones (565 U.S. 400). Explore how Justice Antonin Scalia stunned legal scholars by reviving 18th-century English common law trespass to rule that automobiles are protected 'effects.' We dissect Justice Samuel Alito's 'Mosaic Theory' of prolonged surveillance and Justice Sonia Sotomayor's prophetic concurrence attacking the Third-Party Doctrine. Finally, we examine the chilling reality of 2026: why police no longer need to touch your car when automakers and data brokers harvest your real-time vehicle telematics around the clock. Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #FourthAmendment #PrivacyLaw --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*

Can police draw a virtual circle on a map and demand that tech companies identify every person inside? Following an unsolved 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, detectives drew a 150-meter circular geofence covering 17.5 acres—sweeping up a church, residential homes, and public streets—and served a reverse location warrant on Google's proprietary Sensorvault database. Instead of investigating a suspect to search their property, the warrant inverted the Constitution by investigating a geographic territory to unmask anyone who stepped inside. In this episode of reWandt, we examine the landmark 2026 Supreme Court decision Chatrie v. United States. Explore how Justice Elena Kagan and a 6-3 high court held that accessing an individual's Google Location History via a geofence warrant constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, why the third-party doctrine cannot justify digital dragnet policing, and how this historic ruling protects over a billion smartphone users from modern general warrants in everyday life. Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #GeofenceWarrant #DigitalPrivacy --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*

Can the government track your physical movements backward in time for months without a search warrant? In 2011, federal prosecutors investigating a series of retail armed robberies in Detroit obtained 127 days of historical cell-site location records for Timothy Carpenter—harvesting 12,898 distinct location points without a Fourth Amendment search warrant. Instead, the government relied on Section 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act, arguing that under the traditional Third-Party Doctrine, cell phone users voluntarily disclose their location to wireless carriers simply by keeping a handset powered on. In this episode of reWandt, we unpack the landmark 2018 Supreme Court ruling Carpenter v. United States (585 U.S. 296). Explore how Chief Justice John Roberts and the high court rejected the mechanical application of 1970s landline telephone precedents to modern smartphones, why continuous cell-site tracking functions as a digital time machine, and how the Court established a bright-line warrant requirement that protects 300 million Americans from retrospective mass surveillance in everyday modern life. Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #DigitalPrivacy #FourthAmendment --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*