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WASHINGTON — The growing use by the police of new technologies that make surveillance easier and cheaper to conduct is raising difficult questions about the scope of constitutional privacy rights, leading to disagreements among judges.

A federal appeals court, for example, issued a ruling Aug. 6 that contradicts precedents from three other appeals courts over whether police must obtain a warrant before secretly attaching a GPS device beneath a car.

The issue is whether the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches covers a device that records a suspect’s movements for weeks or months without any need for an officer to trail him.

The GPS-tracking dispute coincides with a burst of other technological tools that expand police-monitoring abilities, including automated license-plate readers in squad cars, speed cameras mounted on streetlight poles and the widely discussed prospect of linking face-recognition computer programs to the proliferating number of surveillance cameras.

Some legal scholars say the escalating use of such high-tech techniques for enhancing traditional police activities is eroding the pragmatic considerations that used to limit how far a law-enforcement official could intrude on people’s privacy without court oversight. They have called for a fundamental rethinking of how to apply Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the 21st century.

“Often what we have to do with the march of technology is realize that the difference in quantity and speed can actually amount to significantly more invasive practices,” said Paul Ohm, a University of Colorado law professor and former federal computer-crimes prosecutor. “It’s like you keep turning the volume knob and it becomes something different, not the same thing just a little louder.”

Security vs. privacy

Such calls seemed to be answered Aug. 6 by an ideologically diverse panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It overturned a drug-trafficking conviction because the evidence against the defendant included tracking data from a GPS receiver that the police hid under his sport-utility vehicle without a warrant. The device essentially recorded his whereabouts 24 hours a day for four weeks.

Traditionally, courts have held that the Fourth Amendment does not cover the trailing of a suspect because people have no expectation of privacy for actions exposed to public view.

But the appeals court argued that people expect their overall movements to be private because different strangers see only isolated moments and a police department’s surveillance resources are limited. GPS technology, by allowing police departments to inexpensively track someone’s comings and goings, changes that equation, it said.

“Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble,” wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg.

“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individual or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

Supreme Court review of the decision seems likely. It contradicted decisions in three similar GPS-related cases by appellate panels in Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco.

In 2007, for example, Judge Richard Posner argued that “following a car on a public street” is “unequivocally not a search within the meaning” of the Fourth Amendment. While acknowledging that “technological progress poses a threat to privacy by enabling an extent of surveillance that in earlier times would have been prohibitively expensive,” he concluded that using a GPS device to investigate a suspect crossed no constitutional line.

The Fourth Amendment “cannot sensibly be read to mean that police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than they were in the 18th,” he wrote. “There is a trade-off between security and privacy, and often it favors security.”

Posner also cited a 1983 Supreme Court ruling upholding the use of a hidden radio transmitter that helped police trail a suspect. But other judges have argued that the limited power of that device makes it different from the prolonged, automated tracking that GPS devices enable.

“Un-American”?

On Thursday, five judges on the San Francisco appeals court dissented from a decision not to rehear a ruling upholding the warrantless use of GPS trackers. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski characterized the tactic as “creepy and un-American” and contended its capabilities handed “the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives.”

There is no central repository of how many police forces use the devices, which cost several hundred dollars. But there has been a recent spate of cases about them. Several state supreme courts — including those in Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Washington — have ruled that their state constitutions require police to obtain a warrant to use them.

Related questions have arisen over businesses’ customer records, which courts generally allow police to obtain without a warrant. The appeals court in Philadelphia is considering whether the Fourth Amendment protects location data for cellphones.

The few Fourth Amendment cases involving contemporary technologies to reach the Supreme Court have generally stuck to the principle that privacy rights cover only actions no one else could normally see or hear. In 2001, for example, the court ruled that without a warrant, police cannot point a thermal-imaging device at a home in search of heat associated with marijuana growing.