( CNN ) -- The Supreme Court is about to hold hearings on whether the police need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect 's car and trace its movements while it is in a public space . ( The case at hand , United States v. Jones , concerns a major drug dealer , and the police could not use the data collected while his car was parked in his garage . ) The intense debate the case has already elicited among legal scholars , civil rights and libertarian activists , and those particularly concerned with public safety and national security is largely focused on the question : what would the Founding Fathers have said about the case ? As I see it , at least equal weight should be accorded to the question : How well are our public authorities doing in their dealings with criminals ? Who needs more tools and who should be denied access to cyber-age technologies if we are to keep a balance between our profound and essential commitments to privacy as well as our security ? According to national statistics for 2010 , less than half ( 47 % ) of violent crimes committed in this country are `` cleared '' ( that is , suspects are arrested , charged , and turned over for prosecution ) and only one out of five ( 18 % ) criminals who commit nonviolent crimes ( such as burglary ) are caught and tried . For obvious reasons there are no such statistics available for terrorists , and the fact that there was no successful attack in the U.S. over the past 10 years tends to make us complacent . However , if one takes into account that there are many millions of people in the world who hate us and wish us harm ( and at least a few right here in the U.S. ) , we should maintain our vigilance . As one terrorist group once put it , `` You have to be lucky all the time . We only have to be lucky once . '' To argue that the preceding data show that the government should be given some more leeway is not a violation of the Constitution , but directly sanctioned by it . Unlike the First Amendment , which is worded in absolute terms -- `` Congress shall make NO law '' -- the Fourth Amendment bans only unreasonable searches . That is , it recognizes that there is a whole category of searches that are fully legitimate and violate no one 's rights . As to what is reasonable , it obviously changes with the circumstances . Given that criminals can use freely all the new technologies -- including of course GPS trackers , smartphones and spyware -- it seems eminently reasonable that the police should also be able to use some of these , especially in public spaces , in which people have no expectation of privacy ( or at least should not have one ) . Opponents argue that the Founding Fathers provided that before a warrant is issued , the police need to show probable cause by bringing data to a judge , who reviews the facts and determines whether a warrant is appropriate and how it should be issued . However , this is needed only for searching people 's private spaces -- their homes , personal effects , and personal records such as diaries -- and not for using a technology that does what cops have been doing for a century : Track a suspect in public spaces , without a warrant . Moreover , often some such surveillance is needed before a tip or lead can be developed to the point that it meets the standard of probable cause . The counter-argument that if the police are allowed to proceed , we shall be all tracked seven days a week , round the clock does not withstand minimal criticism . At most , the GPS data tells us that someone drove a car to certain places . Who lives or works there , what happened , etc . etc. , all remain to be investigated . If the police put GPS devices in all the cars on the road , or even only in one out of every thousand , cops would be buried under an endless flood of data points -- among which suspects would be lost . At the same time , the police should be required to file reports after the fact about their use of GPS trackers . If it turns out that they are employed too often or to track people who are , say , political activists , the police should be reprimanded and if they persist , elected officials ( say , a city council ) should set limits on the use of this and other crime-fighting technologies and punish those who abuse them . If the data ran the other way -- if most criminals were neutralized and we did not have to be concerned about terrorists -- reasonable people who seek to deny the police the use of GPS trackers without probable cause might have a much stronger case . However , even then , I have a hard time believing that the Founding Fathers meant for the police to be denied tools available to all others , including the bad dudes . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Amitai Etzioni .
Should law enforcement need a warrant before planting a GPS tracking device on a car ? No , the Supreme Court ought to decide that they should not , says Amitai Etzioni . In this case , our need for security outweighs privacy concerns , he says . Cops have already been tracking suspects in public places for a century , Etzioni says .