{"id":4426,"date":"2010-07-14T09:09:11","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T09:02:54","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-14T09:02:54","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=4426","title":{"rendered":"W.D.La.: Court order activating leased vehicle’s OnStar GPS was reasonable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Defendant leased a Tahoe from Enterprise, and it was equipped with OnStar<\/a>. The government got a court order to monitor the GPS in the vehicle to see where he was. That court order did not violate the Fourth Amendment or any reasonable expectation of privacy. United States v. Dantzler, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 68753 (W.D. La. June 16, 2010):<\/p>\n

Applying the foregoing considerations to the case at bar, it is manifest that Dantzler did not enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in the movement of his rented vehicle on public thoroughfares. The OnStar system revealed no more information than what law enforcement officers could have observed from constant surveillance of the vehicle from the time that it was rented in Houston until the time of the stop. Although defendant trumpets the fact that the court order was issued to a Michigan corporation, for a vehicle that was rented in Texas, there is no evidence that Louisiana law enforcement officials acted upon any information provided by OnStar until the vehicle approached the Louisiana border. It was not until the vehicle passed the officers’ surveillance point in Louisiana that an OnStar representative actively assisted the state trooper to confirm that the vehicle had passed his vantage point. Moreover, this is not a case where authorities physically installed a tracking device on defendant’s vehicle. Rather, the officers merely accessed information that defendant’s rented vehicle had transmitted to a third-party monitoring service.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Dantzler either knew or should have known that he was renting an OnStar-equipped vehicle that was capable of transmitting the vehicle’s location to a monitoring service. As a result, defendant accepted the risk that the information that the tracking system transmitted to the third-party monitoring service could be forwarded to others. See Smith v. Maryland<\/a>, 442 U.S. 735, 743-744, 99 S.Ct. 2577, 2582, 61 L. Ed. 2d 220 (1979) (by using his telephone, petitioner conveyed information to the telephone company and assumed the risk that the information would be turned over to the police). Even if Dantzler was not aware that he was renting a vehicle outfitted with OnStar, he has not demonstrated that society expects the movements of a rental car to remain private. See Smith<\/a>, supra.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For those interested in GPS under the Fourth Amendment, this case thoroughly discusses the reasonable expectation of privacy issues and what those advocating a reasonable expectation of privacy from GPS monitoring have to overcome. I’d provide a pdf of the opinion, but it costs too much to do it very often.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}