[nateb2022]

In the 1760s there was something called a writ of assistance, which allowed British officers to search any location for smuggled goods without specific suspicion.

The Framers of the Constitution drafted the Fourth Amendment in direct response to these abusive general warrants, protecting against the exact kind of arbitrary power that placed "the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer." (John Adams)

Moreso, Adams maintains:

  Writs in their nature are temporary things. When the purposes for which they are issued are answered, they exist no more; but these live forever; no one can be called to account...

  But these prove no more than what I before observed, that special writs may be granted on oath and probable suspicion. The act of 7 and 8 William III that the officers of the plantations shall have the same powers, etc., is confined to this sense; that an officer should show probable ground; should take his oath of it; should do this before a magistrate; and that such magistrate, if he think proper, should issue a special warrant to a constable to search the places.

As Justice Sotomayor noted in United States v. Jones, logging a vehicle's public movements "reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." An action revealing all this is ipso facto a search; and Flock performs this search in the very absence of a specific warrant that Adams so vehemently opposed.

[skinfaxi]

US v Jones was in the context of placing an actual recording device on an individual vehicle, which seems dramatically distinct from observing every passing vehicle and recording what you saw. Police cars already do this to some extent with ALPR, scanning for plates that have been reported stolen.

https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/blog/new-technology-h...

[nateb2022]

> US v Jones was in the context of placing an actual recording device on an individual vehicle

You are focusing exclusively on Justice Scalia's opinion. Five other Justices provided two separate concurrences in that same case, including Alito's:

  society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.

[skinfaxi]

I appreciate that quote. My take was indeed founded on the majority opinion, which holds out non-physical intrusions as a separate issue that the verdict did not reach.

"It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."