In 2012, Supreme Court justices declared in a 5–4 decision that the Fourth Amendment required that the police get a search warrant before putting a GPS locator on a suspect’s car.14 While the other justices found that the “physical intrusion” of attaching a device to someone’s car required a search warrant, Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized that in the twenty-first century, law enforcement didn’t necessarily need to physically intrude to track someone’s location. GPS-enabled smartphones, which create remote records of someone’s location, were starting to spread. They revealed all sorts of
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