[mrdingle]

To me, this supreme court decision stands as precedent against the ISP's forced tracking. If recording your vehicle moves constitutes a search, then recording your online moves surely constitutes a search.

The only difference is that the supreme court ruling mentions officers having to enter a constitutionally protected area(your car) to install the searching device. With ISP data recording they would have to make no such intrusion, as it would be built in. It would be as though every car came with GPS monitoring and all the feds had to to was ask for it from your car's manufacturer.

[SoftwareMaven]

It would surprise me if the police hadn't gone to OnStar to get exactly that kind of tracking information. Even if they haven't, just reframing the case the way you have reduces the applicability of the ruling significantly. It wouldn't be hard to argue "the Internet is a public place" and as such, there is no expectation of privacy (perhaps with the exception of SSL, but AFAIK, PCIPA doesn't require keeping the actual data, just the logs of where you went, which, even with SSL, the IP address you are visiting is clear text).

I think we will need new legislation or some serious divine intervention for this decision to protect our online privacy from the government.