I agree. For the police to put a tracking device on an individual's car without a warrant seems wholy wrong on the face of it. I have a question, though. Is it illegal to work around warrant-approved wire tapping and tracking devices placed by law enforcement? I assume it would be in the case of phone lines and other means of public business. However, it seems difficult to contemplate that an individual would not have the right to modify their own car in any manner that is consistent with typical standards of safety. I.e...you should be allowed to remove the device.

escalators never fail; they just become stairs

   I'm not much of a civil libertarian, mainly because I believe compromise is essential for civilization to keep going. The government should be able show good reason why a behavior or act is warranted, but the bar for me isn't as high as it seems to be for others. (And I say this having been a huge fan of Robert Anton Wilson for well over a decade.) While this gives me a vague uneasy feeling, upon reflection the technology is widespread enough I can't see how the courts could really come to any other decision. I remember a Supreme Court case that hinged on whether an IR device was common enough to warrant being considered extraordinary enough to violate the 4th Amendment, with the Court eventually deciding it was. Considering folk are putting GPS trackers on their pets, the technology can certainly labeled "common."
   The more interesting question to me is whether or not a universal GPS capability would be greeted with horror or relief. I mean, we're certainly headed that way voluntarily: cars come with them, so you'll (almost) never get lost; hikers are encouraged to carry them, in case they get lost; I found at least three sites via Google that will sell business owners GPS kits to track their own vehicles; and, as always, the kids are having deal with a new level of parental snooping (much to the annoyance of these folks. (Looks like a fun site for anyone looking for Bush-bashing from a (more or less) conservative vantage.) GPS transmitters in every car? I can see them becoming a standard feature in higher end cars soon, and an industry standard in ten-- because of consumer demand, and not any governmental decree.
   Now, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but then I'm a bit tech-phobic anyway, so I see this as another instance where technology enacted irreversible change before any but a savvy few thought to lay down some ground rules that would come in handy later. Meh. With "interconnectedness" being the big buzz word for the last couple years, I can't see how some kind of surveillance society was anything but inevitable.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

While I don't agree with the court's logic, I can kind of see where they were coming from. To look at a parallel case - it's legal for the police to put a suspect under surveillance and to sit in an apartment across from his house and watch him at all times. It's also legal to set up a videotape across from said suspect's house and watch him at all times. It's even legal to put up cameras on public streets to watch everyone at all times. We may not like it, but these exceptions have been in the law for a long time. The problem isn't so much with the court's decision as with the law itself. It would be nice to see someone start pushing for a "privacy amendment" to the constitution, that would more firmly limit the governments rights to track, watch, or otherwise bother us without good cause, but in this day and age I suppose it's naive to think that will happen anytime soon.

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

While this is a sucky thing, I can't help but think that a whole cottage industry will crop up that will help people defeat these things.  And of course, that brings up a whole set of other issues.

Science fiction writer and physicist David Brin wrote an interesting article about watching the watchers in a "surveillance society".  

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Back in the days of the Greeks, Plato wrote the above subject in the Republic...it roughly means who will watch the watchers or who will protects us from the protectors?

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

The write-up doesn't specify how the gps device ended up on the suspects car and I can't open pdf documents because this computer at work is exceptionally lame. Can anyone tell me?

escalators never fail; they just become stairs