A US federal judge has denied a warrant request for GPS data when “not to collect evidence of a crime, but solely to locate a charged defendant”.

The warrant asked for “unlimited location data at any time on demand during a 30-day period”. The defense attorney argued that a search warrant requires proof of “a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.” A suspect, in other words, does not automatically lose the right to privacy — unless there is a flight risk the data on all movement by a suspect is not sufficient on its own to justify a warrant.

The NYT reports that the US Supreme Court also is about to hear similar arguments for using GPS data to track a suspect.

In April, Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote that surveillance using global positioning system devices would “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.” In a similar case last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.”

Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion” and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”

The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?

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The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.

The ruling could also affect how warrants are applied to other location-aware technology used by large service providers. I will discuss it Tuesday in my presentation on “Trends in Cloud Forensics” at the High Technology Crime Investigation Association International Conference. Hope to see you there.