The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday said “get a warrant.” Why, then, on Wednesday, did a witness at a legislative hearing in Montpelier say “you don’t need one?”

Granted, the situations were different. The Supreme Court’s order came in a case where police surreptitiously attached a GPS tracking device to the underbody of a car used by an alleged drug dealer. The court found that the mere fact of attaching such a device, without a warrant, was an invasion of the man’s privacy. The car was the family’s property. And using that device to track the man continuously around the Washington area couldn’t be done without court review.

Wednesday’s legislative witness was discussing individuals’ prescription drug records collected in a state database. He’s an investigator for a New Jersey crime commission. He had been invited to speak to Vermont legislators about the street-level drug scene. His appearance was part of a review of a proposal by Vermont police and the Shumlin administration to open the state Health Department’s prescription drug monitoring database to cops. Prescription drug abuse is rampant around the country, including Vermont, police say.

The health and public safety departments insist that Vermont is an outlier when it comes to how it manages its prescription drug database. The commissioners claim police are denied access to the Vermont database, whereas in other states police have easy, warrantless, surf-and-click access.

Neither statement is true, despite the impressions created at Wednesday’s legislative hearing.

Through public records requests, the ACLU has not been able to determine a single time Vermont police, warrant in hand, have been turned away from accessing the state drug database. In fact, we’ve found no time that police have even attempted to get a warrant to access the database.

The bottom line seems to be this: Police don’t want to have to deal with the inconvenience of asking a judge for a warrant – stating in writing the reasons they think a crime has been committed. This is despite the fact warrants in Vermont can now be obtained by e-mail, 24/7. Getting a warrant isn’t much of an inconvenience at all.

And the claim that in other states police don’t need court approval for a search, they can just surf and click away? Well, for the specific state mentioned this morning by the New Jersey witness, here are the requirements for his home state of New Jersey: Access is granted to “a state, federal or municipal law enforcement officer who is acting pursuant to a court order and certifies that the officer is engaged in a bona fide specific investigation of a designated practitioner or patient.”

Prescription drug database searches are connected to GPS searches. They’re connected to cell-phone tracking data searches. And they’re connected to e-medical records searches and smart meter searches. They all represent searches of digital data that can be made to reveal significant information about people’s private lives. They are all made possible by the easy collection, transmission, storage, aggregation, and disaggregation of megabytes of information, accessed at the click of a mouse.

Some justices on the Supreme Court wanted their colleagues to go further in Tuesday’s decision, and draw bright lines in many areas related to digital data. The majority wasn’t ready to do that. But everyone knows this is a new area that touches everyone’s life in myriad ways. The issue, in another guise, will come before the court again.

There’s only one thing protecting us from the desire of police to get at that data. It’s the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. There’s nothing difficult about how it works to do this. Police need a warrant before they enter our private lives.

That’s pretty simple, and the Supreme Court said as much Tuesday. We just hope state legislators can keep that in mind as they consider whether cops can, without a warrant, look at the drugs doctors prescribe for us.