Deer poaching doesn't sound like a typical ACLU case. We aren't an animal rights organization and we don't weigh in on hunting, when the season can begin or how many deer someone is allowed to kill. Joshua Liebl is accused of illegally poaching dozens of deer and was charged with multiple crimes in 2014.
However, there is one part of his case that has implications beyond hunting, and it deals with our right to privacy. The Department of Natural Resources secretly put a GPS device on his truck and tracked his movements for weeks. They did this without a traditional search warrant. They didn't have to appear in front of a judge, and argue why they had probable cause to get a warrant. Instead, they could get a "tracking order" which has a lower burden of proof. This practice, while seemingly allowed under Minnesota law, is actually in direct violation of the Minnesota and U.S. constitutions.
In U.S. v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that placing a GPS tracker on a suspect's car and monitoring him for 28 days was a search under the Fourth Amendment. A majority of the justices said that long-term GPS monitoring of a vehicle "impinges on expectations of privacy."
Through tracking your location, the government can learn an enormous deal about you, ranging from which friends you're seeing to where you go to the doctor to how often you go to church.Freedom from unreasonable government snooping has always been a foundation of liberty in America.
We filed a brief in this case, and we hope that the Minnesota Court of Appeals agrees because we should not be opening the door to these warrantless searches. Instead, we need to send a clear message that this practice is wrong, and infringes on our important Fourth Amendment rights.