The ticking-bomb rule just doesn’t hold water if the timer has been going for a month.

That was the ruling by one federal appeals court in August, when it rightly overturned a Washington, D. C., night-club owner’s drug conviction on the grounds that the global positioning system device police had attached to his car— for 28 days—amounted to an unconstitutional search.

Unfortunately, other federal courts, including the usually liberal 9th Circuit Court in California, have held otherwise. Worse, the Obama administration in general, and the FBI in particular, continue to argue that investigators have the right to attach GPS gizmos to cars belonging to anyone, for any reason, for any length of time, without having to explain themselves to a judge.

This line of thinking clearly offends the spirit of the Bill of Rights, even if its authors weren’t clairvoyant enough to include the letters GPS in the Fourth Amendment.

Recently, a young man in California took his car in for an oil change and was told by the mechanics that he had some kind of odd machine attached to the car’s undercarriage. Mystified, Yasir Afifiposted a photo of the device on the Internet and asked if anyone could tell him what it was.

The FBI could. Not only that, agents appeared at Afifi’s doorstep and demanded their machine back. There’s no official explanation why the FBI bothered to electronically trail Afifi, who has family in Egypt, so ethnic profiling must be suspected.

Afifi’s lawyer says he doesn’t see much to be gained from suing the bureau, given that the controlling precedent in that part of the country is that it is OK for the government to use the latest technology to track your automobile’s every move, without asking you, telling you or even establishing to a judge why your actions demand such scrutiny.

And that’s bad news for everyone.

It’s not that law enforcement agencies can’t use modern technology to snoop on people they believe need to be snooped on. It’s just that they should not be allowed to do so without first employing an old-fashioned tool called a search warrant.

Despite the frequently heard lament of administrations of both parties and prosecutors at all levels, warrants are not that complicated. They are basic legal tools that have been used for centuries, even if you sometimes have to wake up a judge in the middle of the night to get one.

And the argument that time is of the essence, that any delay for legal delicacies will only allow the bad guys to blow something up, clearly does not apply in cases where the agents want to track someone’s every move for days or weeks on end.

Because some federal courts agree that a warrant should be required for such activities, and some do not, the logical next step is for the question to be settled by the U. S. Supreme Court. But, given its current make-up and the chief justice’s devotion to conservative judicial activism, the chances of the civil liberties of American citizens and legal residents being protected at that level are slim.

Better the White House change its tune. Better still that Congress make the the warrant requirement a law, so no one will be confused that the Constitution means what it says.