Enlarge / The border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan, as seen in 2015. (credit: Ken Lund / Flickr)
At the end of August, a federal judge in Riverside, California made a potentially landmark decision for border privacy advocates—finding that it is unconstitutional for federal agents to warrantlessly install GPS tracking devices onto a truck entering the United States from Canada.
In the grand scheme, the decision stands in the face of a controversial but standing legal idea called “the border doctrine.” The doctrine’s concept is that warrants are not required to conduct a search at the border in the name of national sovereignty.
And in this particular incident—a case called United States v. Slavco Ignjatov et al. that allegedly involves Starbucks cheese danishes and a trafficking organization that sounds straight out of Breaking Bad—the ruling could be a major victory for defendants as it would suppress any evidence obtained through the use of the warrantless GPS tracker.
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