Diving deeper into that 9-0 Supreme Court vote on GPS

Legal experts say unanimous decision signals anything but broad agreement

Longtime Buzzblog reader George Grenley writes to call our attention to a pair of posts on the SCOTUSblog (Supreme Court of the United States Blog) that analyze this week's unanimous GPS-related ruling and find a lot less agreement - as well as more concern for the future of privacy rights - than the 9-0 vote would indicate.

I just finished reading the two posts -- Reactions to Jones v. United States: "The government fared much better than everyone realizes," and "Opinion recap: Tight limit on police GPS use." They are very interesting, if somewhat difficult for this layman to follow. And, since those writers are legal experts and I am but a scribe, I will not dare quibble with their contentions that the government has more to like in the decision than the 9-0 vote would indicate.

However, I remain heartened by the mere fact that the court's conservatives were willing to make any concessions whatsoever -- explicit or implied -- to the fact that 18th Century lawmakers and their fellow citizens couldn't have envisioned the intrusiveness of 21st Century technology. I'm sure some if not all of these justices will find reason to see otherwise in some future cases ...  but a win is a win is a win.

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