A Look at Cellphone Tracking, Flock Cameras, and the Growing Legal Limits on Technology-assisted Policing.
A child has been abducted. Police know the make and model of the suspect's vehicle, but not where it went. Within seconds, roadside cameras can search thousands of photographs and may locate the vehicle.
Shots are fired in a neighborhood, and no one calls 911. Sensors can identify the sound as probable gunfire, estimate its location, and alert officers in less than a minute.
A murder suspect drives across the country. License plate photographs, surveillance cameras, and cellphone records can help investigators reconstruct his movements long after they occurred.
Few would question the public-safety value of these tools. Their growing capabilities, however, raise a harder question: At what point does technology become so powerful that collecting otherwise public information becomes a search under the Fourth Amendment?
