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Man Stalks Ex-girlfriend With GPS
grouchomarxist writes "According to this article at CNN: Police arrested a man they said tracked his ex-girlfriend's whereabouts by attaching a global positioning system to her car. Police said Gabrielyan attached a cellular phone to the woman's car on August 16 with a motion switch that turned on when the car moved, transmitting a signal each minute to a satellite. Information was then sent to a Web site that allowed Gabrielyan to monitor the woman's location." A ruling last year stated that police need a warrant to track individuals in a similar fashion.
I need to get one for my girlfriend's car. Alright, she's not my girlfriend, yet, but she will be once I'm able to track her 24/7.
See, this is exactly why we need fuel cells in our phones...I mean...eh...this is just wrong and illegal...
Well, this is hardly news to us on
No doubt that'll change over the next year.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It actually sounds like a neat project, just a sketchy application. I wonder if its legal to attach one to, say, your child's car. Perhaps make the sensor a bit less sensitive, so it only broadcasts a signal after an impact-type shock.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
All this and he couldn't figure out how to hook the thing up to the car battery?
This has also been covered briefly on Engadget and more thoroughly on BoingBoing, where links to the original article and the District Attorney's report are provided.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
"transmitting a signal each minute to a satellite." WOW - this guy had a SATELLITE too? ...Why does the News continually report GPS technology as sending data TO a satellite - GPS receivers are completely passive.
Either our media/news is completely ignorant, or they assume that all their readers are completely ignorant.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
>The woman learned how Gabrielyan was following her when she discovered him under her car attempting to change the cell phone's battery, police said.
This is a perfect metaphor for the 21 century... Hyped futuristic capabilities with obvious and forgotten shortcomings. 12v line from the power system, anyone?
If you are going to be compulsively obsessed to the exclusion of all else, at least sweat the details.
The ______ Agenda
After a bad breakup with my car insurance company recently, they're doing the same
Any instructions on how to set one of these up? Sounds like the only improvement necessary was a hookup to the car battery. Duh! Also, don't phones these days have GPS or something like it built in, that locates the phone based on triangulation with cell towers? If you used that you could do away with the GPS unit altogether, and just need a motion switch to trigger a program on the phone that texts the location - or just make it transmit at intervals.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Dozens? After about the first six she should have gotten a restraining order.
Hey, combine this with the little black boxes Progressive Insurance has been pushing, and you too can have your insurance revoked in real-time while driving!
Laughing On Rolling Floor.
;)
That's what happens when you read posts like this one while trying to tie up your yacht at the dock in the middle of Hurricane Frances. I'd provide a link but I can't seem to find any clips from that video on the Web. If you've seen any news in the last 36 hours, you'll know what video I'm talking about, though.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
See this archive on The Smoking Gun from a man arrested for doing the same thing in 2002. I guess someone else just took the hint and tried it again 2 years later.
;)
"Meet Paul Seidler. The 42-year-old Wisconsin man was just busted on charges that he conducted a high-tech stalking campaign directed at a former girlfriend. Kenosha police allege that Seidler placed a Global Positioning System tracking device under the hood of the woman's car and began monitoring her movements."
Hey, it's a slow weekend, so I think a near-dupe of not-so-cutting-edge news is forgivable
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Stalking is still stalking here. A new way to stalk doesn't always mean that the stalking is unprosecutable. I do have to ask exactly how the cellphone can be affordably rigged to call every minute. That must be expensive. Either that, or it is another detail the media has gotten wrong.
...is so important. There are LEGITIMATE REASONS to not want to have a tracking device in your car, not just tinfoil hat paranoia. Sure there may be "privacy protections" but keep in mind that a company's privacy is only as strong as the minimum wage employee who's bribed $100 to let a stalker have some info.
Every time I read one of these stories of a guy wigging out because his girlfriend dumped him, I always think, "Hey, Chief, do ya think she was on to something?" I mean, girl dumps boy. Boy stalks her using GPS. Maybe she was onto something in dumping him?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Geeks are 100% dedicated to a relationship and will go that extra mile.
Oh, and also: Phear the g33k!
Yet it is illegal for a private citizen to follow someone in public. What is with the double standard?
Yeah, it'll be called "Fearer Dot Com"
I doubt the GPS part would have led to a conviction in Cali standing by itself. Of course, the GPS will haelp make the case for the stalking, but wouldn't likely be illegal if that were all he had done.
Pretty scary, huh?
p.s. - Can you techies tell me how to hook one of these up?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
He's not a very good stalker if he was under her car changing the battery to the cell-phone!
I mean, he could of spent a little time and hooked it up to the car battery (it's possible) and on TOP of that, he could have used a phone that auto-accepts incoming calls when a hands-free headset is used, and just short the HF plug-in spot to make the phone think one is plugged in.. and
whalla, you have a tracker/voice-listener thingy-ma-jigger!
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
attaching a global positioning system to her car.
He created and attached an entire global positioning system of satellites to her car? Now that's impressive! I wonder how she didn't notice...
This got me wondering, though. What if, for example, I was to do something like this to my wife's car? I own the car, right? So I should be able to modify it (within safety concerns of course) how I see fit.
Not that I'm saying I'd stalk my own wife, or anything. I'm just wondering what makes stalking one's girlfriend fundamentally different than stalking, say, one's wife.
"Information was then sent to a Web site that allowed Gabrielyan to monitor the woman's location."
Link?
I never saw fear.com, but I kept wondering whether the lethal website had been created with Microsoft FrontPage.
Based on some of the news reports the device used was likely some Nextel GPS enabled phone, like the i58sr with the AtlasTrack 2.0 software and service provided by Networks in Motion.
Phone
Software
Service
Not connecting the phone to the car battery becomes less suprising when you realize the solution in available at the mall.
They also arrest and execute criminals.
No civilized governments do that. Civilized governments arrest and prosecute criminals. Then according to what fits the bill best, they fine, jail or give them proper psychological treatment.
Do you live in some barbaric third world country where torture and imprisonment without fair trials are still part of the legal system too?
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Yea, now I have an RFID chip from the Swarthmore College CS department. I don't need to wear it, but it allows me to unlock the lab doors. One of my friends complained about it, so I told him he should stick it to his right hand or forehead :-)
Yea, RFID is handy, but I know it will be abused some day. I know I will be scared when RFID replaces credit/debit cards.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Now think of the capabilities these technologies gave the Nazi propagandists of the 1930s and 1940s.
There's a dark side to every new technology. For a small class of people, technological advances will always represent only fantastic new ways to wage war, or to harrass and murder their fellow man.That was a ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court (the state I live in) and I remember reading about it. This ruling has no effect in the other 49 states or on the Feds. While the ruling may influence other judges, the Washington State Constitution generally has more citizen friendly rules on privacy and related matters than the U. S. Constitution or most state constitutions, which may narrow the applicability of the reasoning in this case to other judicial venues.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
And it doesn't bother them.
I've talked with teenagers about what it means when their cell phone has GPS. They're not bothered by having their location reported. They like the idea of knowing where all their friends are. Then they'd know who's nearby, and could hook up. It's a feature.
But so I could _NOT_ run into her.
I kept running into her with my new girlfriend (obtained after the breakup with the wife). It was awkward, to say the least...
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No. Your point being?
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Restraining order is just a piece of paper. When the chips are down, a piece of paper won't stop a determined and obsessive stalker. Glock 26 works better as a deterrent.
You must have a lot of courage. Making a gynecologist believe that you are a woman sounds scary.
"Hey, what is that?"
"Dunno. Never saw one on any of my patients before. Remove it."
And every trip you take...
Restraining orders I'll break...
Don't you try and fake...
I AM WATCHING YOU
One night while doing some shift work (6PM-6AM), one of my co-workers went home for "lunch" at 2AM. He found that his wife wasn't home and, worse, had left their 4 year old son unattended. This was the second time that had happened, so he decided to investigate. The next time we were working night shifts, he put a GPS under a blanket that happened to be in the back of their hatchback. Twelve hours later (again after his wife hadn't been home at "lunchtime") he retrieved the GPS. He followed the recorded track around, and then along with a few friends, staked out the route the next time we were on mids. One of them spotted her in a parking lot and videotaped her from a distance for the next few hours. He contacted the cops (this being an military base and overseas) and turned over the tape. The police investigated, determined she was running a prostitution ring, and had her deported back to her country of origin. My co-worker was able to both successfuly divorce her and get custody of the child.
As far as I am aware, none of these illicit "GPS tracking" devices actually use GPS to do any of their tracking. These devices have no GPS receivers and don't receive any GPS signals. But I wouldn't blame shoddy reporting in the press, because the manufacturers of these devices blatantly false advertise their products.
The reason why they're not using GPS should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used a GPS device. GPS devices need to be pointed towards the sky in order to read the GPS satellite signals. Without line of sight access to the sky, GPS devices just won't work.
And since law enforcement (or stalkers) really don't want the people they're tracking to know they're being tracked, GPS devices are of no use to them. Even the smallest GPS device would be pretty obvious once placed in a functional location on a car. The devices would have to be installed in plain view to be able to perform any tracking.
Since the real need is for devices that can be easily hidden in or under a car, they need to connect to a transmission system that is not line of sight. Each and of these I've researched actually use cellular phone networks to triangulate the target position. Sure, these devices might report that position correlated to the GPS coordinate map. They could just as easily report the location in longitude and latitude, but since they report it in GPS numbers, they call them "GPS trackers". In my mind, every advertisement calling these devices "GPS Trackers", are complete and total lies.
An added benefit to these devices exclusive use of the cellular networks would make it seem damn simple to protect oneself from them. A simple, cheap and easy to find cell phone jammer (available over the net from Canada or Israel) should make all of these trackers totally useless.
If you don't have damages, why would you complain? Why would it make the news?
The FBI was tracking MLK and even harrassing him. What about that?
What am I afraid of? At the worst, political blackmail on a large scale.
Everyone has somthing to hide. Imagine a scenario where those who go against the powers that be will be outed and exposed, just like in the Soviet Union. Everyone had a skeleton in their closet. In the USSR, it was only outed if you did the politically wrong thing. Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" has a nice description of this on a personal level near the end. It only has to happen if a person is likely to come into a position of power. Everyone else's files are just "insurance."
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I wish I was his girlfriend, because some stupid punks stole my car yesterday. Man, I would love to find out who it was and where he is.
since we're on the subject of what people would do in bad breakup situtations with technology...
this is another example you would all enjoy. i just couldn't laugh my head off watching it.
psycho girl
my blog
An eye for a fucking eye.
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." --Ghandi
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
You know, if it were not for this article, I very well might have forgotten to read my ex-girlfriend's email tonight...
(For informational purposes only)
1. Buy car power adapter (12V) for that cell phone.
2. Take apart cigarette lighter box thing. Save the circuit board with the voltage regulator on it.
3. Attach wire to the positive (+) input (the part that was attached to the tip of the cigarette lighter plug). This wire will go to the battery. Maybe attach either a alligator clip or some kind of pin that can stick through any existing power wire (follow one from the battery, they commonly use red insulation for +12V).
4. Attach a short wire and an alligator clip to the negative (-) input. This can attach anywhere to the car chassis. Try to make a good connection. A good connection will make the device more reliable.
5. Hide the thing so the victem won't find it (consider painting it black).
(I am not endorsing this kind of behavior at all).
My other first post is car post.
No, the law does Not say "GPS" has to be installed in cell phones. It simply says the phones need to be able to be tracked by location. And that this location information needs to be available to emergency services (911). And despite a lot of protestations from the tinfoil hat crowd, this law will not mandate the installation of trackers into new cell phones. Why? Because all cell phones can already be tracked today.
Building GPS into phones would be silly because GPS needs to be within line of sight to the sky. A roof over your head and the GPS tracking wouldn't work at all.
There is a huge difference between GPS and cellular phone triangulation. And neither the device described in this article nor any of the "GPS Tracking" devices I've seen actually use GPS. They use cellular phone networks to triangulate your location based on the known positions of the cell phone towers. I read about some hackers doing this in 2600 magazine about a decade ago. The reason a lot of these devices are falsely called "GPS Trackers" is simply because they report locations in GPS coordinate format instead of longitude and latitude. They actually have zero to do with GPS satellites.
Anyway, the cell phone industry is not building trackers into cell phones. They don't need to. They can triangulate your position any time your phone is turned on, right now! They've always done this to a certain extent. It's how they hand off your call to the next tower.
The only difference now is that government legislation is forcing the phone companies to upgrade their main office phone equipment. Allowing export of this existing triangulation data to emergency services. Is it big brotherish? Sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think the dark and scary government agencies haven't had access to this stuff for ages.
The good part about this is that anyone suspecting they've been tagged can check for these devices with a cheap cell phone signal detector. I guess some of these devices could be very sneaky and only turn on for a short burst every minute or so. So the safest bet would be to purchase a portable cell phone jammer. Jammers are cheap and easily available on the net from non-US sources. And they should entirely disable any of theses "GPS trackers.".