It's more complex than that. Alito suggested that factors included the amount of tracking, so tracking a car for a day would be different than tracking it for a month or a year.
So the 5 justices might differ between whether a warrant would be required for "show me all records of where this cell was for the last year" and "show me where this cell was during the day that such-and-such of a crime was committed."
I don't think there is any question that the scope and length reaches to a point where Alito's concerns or Sotomayors would be major factors though. These are huge, dragnet surveillance programs of the sort that I think worried at least 5 justices (and may have worried all of them). Collecting CDRs on all Americans on a daily and ongoing basis along with cell site location info is more intrusive than tracking a car for a few months.
The problem is that to do that kind of queries, if you don't know beforehand what information you are looking for, then you need to store everything.
A comparison can be made to EU data retention laws which stipulate that carriers should keep call records for 6 months (or somehting like that. That is how the directive is implemented here, in Sweden).
> The problem is that to do that kind of queries, if you don't know beforehand what information you are looking for, then you need to store everything.
It's worth reading up on the history of the 4th Amendment in order to realize that isn't very far from the specific situation it was intended to prevent, namely "general warrants" allowing police to search whatever homes they wanted in an investigation.
So the 5 justices might differ between whether a warrant would be required for "show me all records of where this cell was for the last year" and "show me where this cell was during the day that such-and-such of a crime was committed."
I don't think there is any question that the scope and length reaches to a point where Alito's concerns or Sotomayors would be major factors though. These are huge, dragnet surveillance programs of the sort that I think worried at least 5 justices (and may have worried all of them). Collecting CDRs on all Americans on a daily and ongoing basis along with cell site location info is more intrusive than tracking a car for a few months.