Slashdot Mirror
No Warrant Needed For GPS Tracking By Police
museumpeace writes "Ruling that a suspect nabbed using GPS sneaked into his vehicle by police without a warrant, has '... no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway,' a New York judge has seemingly moved the lines in the battle between privacy and police powers. CNET news has this story, which also says 'Not all uses are controversial. Trucking outfits use GPS boxes to keep track of their drivers' locations, and companies sell software to dispatchers that instantly calculates which taxi is closest to a customer.' But I don't buy that. Yesterday in Massachusetts, a snow plow operator, too dumb to know his truck had GPS, exposed himself to a woman at a coffee shop, hopped back in his truck and was apprehended in minutes because the state troopers, knowing only the location of the coffee shop and that it was a snow plow operator, could find his exact whereabouts."
As much as I'm against the Big Brother state, I gotta say it's a little absurd to expect privacy while you're on the road. I mean, the cops don't need a warrant to tail you. They don't need a warrant to put out an APB for your car. Those things accomplish the same thing as GPS -- either tracking your movements or locating you, and they're all completely legal and, in my opinion, reasonable.
This isn't a case of erosion of privacy. It isn't a freedom being taken away. It's not, in my decidedly non-lawyer opinion, a violation of anybody's Constitutional rights. It's just a new way of doing the same things that have been done for decades.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
great, now i can take off my tin foil hat because I'm going to have to cover my entire vehicle in tinfoil!!
Search your car to find out if you win.
OK, so now what's going to stop police from hiding GPS units on many cars parked on the street in high crime neighborhoods and tracking thousands of potential suspects?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
If a man exposes himself to a woman he gets fined/jail time.
If a woman exposes herself to a man she gets whatever she wants!
"knowing only the location of the coffee shop and that it was a snow plow operator, could find his exact whereabouts."
Of course, all they had to do was follow the plowed streets.
Quick! We need a YRO post on this invasion!
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
is Mr Plow.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Not just for the Tin Foil hat crowd. Those who are criminally inclined may find a GPS Jammer handy. Though this does violate FCC regulations. But hey when you committing a crime, does breaking one more law matter?
What could possibly go wrong?
If the vehicle is owned by me, I believe they should have to have a warrant to place one on/in my car. However, if the vehicle is leased (think Rent a Car) or owned by my employer, then the owner of the vehicle should make the decision about the GPS. If the GPS is installed by the owner such as Rent a Car, the police should be required to get a court order to get the tracking info. If no GPS is installed, the owner of the vehicle should be served the warrant. I.E.: Warrant is served to Rent a Car if the driver is a suspect. I guess then Rent a Car has the decision of notifying the driver about the GPS.
"It's a dog eat dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."- Norm (from Cheers)
Are the police really allowed to fuck with my car without a warrant or my knowledge?
I could care less about the GPS and tracking him. What if in installing their little bugs they nick a brake or fuel line, and someone winds up dead?
Note to cops: If I see anyone fucking around under the hood of my car in the middle of the night, I WILL shoot first, and ask questions later, and I will be completely within my rights to do so.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Some kinds of limits need imposed, just as in most places a cop can't follow you 12 miles to see if you break any traffic laws. The question isn't if it's legal to do to some extent, the question is what is the appropriate extent? What are the limits of public surveilance and privacy?
When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome, N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state police. (my bold)
...and...
What's raising eyebrows, though, is the increasingly popular law enforcement practice of secretly tagging Americans' vehicles without adhering to the procedural safeguards and judicial oversight that protect the privacy of homes and telephone conversations from police abuses. (my bold)
The last line sums it up - it seems that police more and more are not adhering to the "rules" to prevent abuse, and now this judge has given his consent for the police to break those "rules". I have no problem using GPS as a surveylance technique, as it's like planting a bug or homing device, but as long as the judicial process has been followed. This ruling by the judge starts to erode at the "innocent until proven guilty" theory. It's the abuses under the Patriot Act all over again.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
> "We're in a world where more and more of our activities can be viewed in public and...be correlated and linked together."
Well, of course. But if we had 100,000,000 cops on duty, they could follow you and trade notes, and no warrant would be required.
GPS is merely a force multiplier. If the EFF guy has a problem with this, I'd encourage him to Read The Fucking Fourth Amendment, and actually pay attention to what it says about what you can poke at without a warrant:
"Persons." "Houses." "Papers." "Effects." Whereabouts of vehicles, wherein the vehicles are registered to the government, the privilege of driving said vehicles is granted by government, and in a country in which the vehicles are driven on roads built by the government and maintained by the government.
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
Privacy is dead. Get over it. But if you don't like it, don't look to the constitution for a right to it, because it ain't there.
A GPS device is placed on the truck, probably by its legal owner. The operator of the snowplow, probably a public employee, commits a crime while using the vehicle. The police use the GPS locator, with the likely cooperation of the owner of the vehicle, to find out who committed the crime.
Makes sense to me. What does the submitter mean "But I don't buy that"? This is supposed to be controversial?
Wait a minute. This is Slashdot. Information wants to be free. I'm sure that the woman in the coffee shop has a lot more information that she wanted.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
If this device was connected to his car then he would have been using his gasoline to transport it. If this was done without permission, the police have stolen (even if only a miniscule amount of) gasoline from him.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
...it's about planting a device on my car for later use against me. If we allow this, could the next device be a concealed tape recorder or other device to monitor my conversations since it is legal to listen to what I say? Since it is as legal to watch a house as it is to track a car, does this mean it is similarly legal to put monitoring devices in the home without my knowledge or permission?
I personally believe that this is a violation of the intent of the fourth amendment. Of course, as I am not a lawyer or a judge, my opinion doesn't really matter.
1 - Police Don't Need Warrant To Use This
2 - In Colorado, a man was convicted for tracking his (soon to be ex) wife using one of these.
Call me a bit strange, however, if an ordinary person can be charged (and convicted) for doing this, then really doesn't that suggest that there needs to be some form of judical oversight when the police do it?
Boris.
Disclaimer - I'm not even in the US.
Perhaps, those who feel that this is a fine practice can explain to me, then, why court orders are required for bugs, wiretaps, and the like. Does information you transmit off your property, over the phone lines, have "no reasonable expectation of privacy?" Clearly, the courts have decided differently, and warrants are required for police to covertly plant such technological surveillance devices.
I don't see this as any different. The police could, for example, track your whereabouts with one of these devices even when you are in a private location (for example, an enclosed garage), or when you are out of their jurisdiction. If they have a court order to do this, that is acceptable. If they do not, this would be far too great a power with far too little oversight.
It sounds like, in most of these cases, a court order/warrant could have been obtained by the police. If it becomes permissible for police agencies to place these devices without suspicion or warrant, what is, in theory, to stop them from planting such devices on every vehicle in existence, and randomly monitoring your activities? This is the reason for mandatory oversight by the courts-it is a check and balance on the power of the executive, law-enforcement branch of government. We advocate removing that check at our own peril.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
What was that, your typical think-of-the-children response?
So what if it's not in the car. It's still being put on my property. Does this mean that the police can attach whatever they want to my vehicle, so long as they don't open the doors, etc?
The point is that the vehicle was tampered with: without a warrant and without notification of the owner.
No it's not. People typically can't hear a conversation in your car. People can, however, follow your car wherever you drive. The bug gives them access to something they couldn't otherwise get. The GPS gives them the same information any other driver on the road already has.
Don't know; Don't care; Don't ask
These things aren't free, nor would the infrastructure to monitor a lot of them be free either.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Next thing you know, the police will be planting GPS trackers in houses. I had to say it before someone else said it by accident.
-
I was working on a project some years ago tracking the location of public transit vehicles, using a subrate data service called CDPD (Cellular Digital Packetized Data or some such...)
We squawked to the vendor of the hardware (Trimble Navigation) that the units had absolutely no access control - allowing any user who knew the IP address of the device to connect to it, and change its stream-of-consciousness reporting, or merely poll it for its current location.
They told us this was not a great concern.
A little human engineering later, we had the IP block used by one of their largest customers (The California Highway Patrol), and showed up at a meeting, not with a map of our transit system, but a display showing the current position, direction and speed of every CHP patrol car in northern California. They finally decided that maybe access control was a good idea.
Now that would have been a moneymaking dot-com!
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Last year the state switched from logbooks to these devices. For weeks (and I do mean weeks) snowplow operators bitched about it to any news crew that would point a camera at them. They said most of them had not received training on their use (true), the snow in the air/on the truck, and cab design would often block the signal from reaching the unit and cause it to not record miles that had been plowed (also true.) What nobody was willing to say was that it ALSO recorded every coffee break that truck operator Bob reported previously as "down that country lane over there". Most of the legitimate complaints were addressed with training by the state and redesigned brackets to hold the units to keep them on the dash and in a good position.
Every snow plow operator in the country was following along and knew all about these devices well before the first flake dropped last year. Hell, MA truck operators threatened to strike. It was a BIG deal.
Please help metamoderate.
I suppose this means that it would be OK to put GPS tracking devices on all the policecars in your town. They can't have an expectation of privacy when on a public roadway, right?
I'm sure the GPS info would be *mighty* valuable to certain criminal elements...
If the cops can put a GPS tracker device on my car without a warrant...
Then if I find it, I can take it apart and use it in my own projects because that fucker's mine!
What, you just clicked through it without reading it when you signed up for your driver's license?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Obviously you haven't considered the best method to keep from being trackedd which is described here.
So does this mean if I attach GPS devices to all the squad cars at my local police station and have a website which shows their location at all times I won't be prosecuted? I mean, surely the police have '... no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway,' either.
Sometimes, a prison is built slowly.
...
If we have no expectation of:
-privacy in moving about the country
-privacy in phone calls
-privacy in email
-privacy in chat
-privacy in surfing the Internet(s)
-privacy of assemblage and conversation in public places
-the right to speak freely anywhere but in our own homes (provided no one outside minds) because all reasonable places to assemble are private property
-the right not to be searched without charge or warrant, either at home, school, or work
-the right not to provide bodily fluids on demand of anyone on pain of loss of employment or education
-the expectation that we will not be watched and/or recorded at any time if we are not sealed in our homes
-the right not to be stripped and humiliated at will in order to travel by air
-the right to buy without surrendering privacy
in what way exactly are we not in a giant open-air prison?
Are you all feeling safer now?
I can't remember a better insane example of how much these words, once a source of pride to the citizens of this country, are mere notions with no basis in reality any more.
U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote that "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway." Sorry, judge, but yes, he did.
When I drive somewhere in my car, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect that I am not being followed and tracked by law enforcement when they have no probable cause to do so.
Don't you expect that privacy? Think about it: Even though you have committed no crime and the police have no compelling reason to think you have done so, wouldn't it surprise you if you found a map on the wall of the local police station with times and locations of everywhere you've driven for the past few weeks? I sure as hell would surprise me and make me more than a little mad if I found out they've been tracking me!
With this judge's idiotic decision, he has sanctioned police to be able to legally collect detailed tracking information for any person at any time for any reason--or even no reason at all! Given the state of today's technology, the judge has, through this decision, decided that it would even be legal for police to simply put GPS bugs with serial numbers on EVERYONE'S car so that they could simply trace every single person in anticipation of them possibly commiting a crime!
Hopefully the people of New York will realize that this is gross infringement on their freedoms and react accordingly.
In the article, it says of a different case, "In placing the electronic devices on the undercarriage of the Toyota 4Runner, the officers did not pry into a hidden or enclosed area." Excuse me, but the undercarriage of a car is not hidden? Does this mean that every time I get in my car to go somewhere, I should check the undercarriage of my car for bugs? What would the police do if I found one of their bugs, removed it, and smashed it to pieces? Probably arrest me for destruction of public property and obstruction of so-called "justice."
This is a clear case of judges tossing out the spirit and meaning of the law and simply coming up with wild interpretations suitable to their whims. I expect this kind of thing from lawyers, but from judges, it's simply intolerable, and represents a gross corruption of our legal system away from the people and towards an oppressive government.
I swear that I will never again pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, nor will I allow my kids to. At one time it was an important symbol of ideals I treasured, but it is painfully obvious that it no longer stands for a republic that believes in freedom and liberty for all. I am ashamed of this kind of behavior. Hopefully someday, things will change and I may believe in it once again.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...
The 4th amendment protects you from intrusion by the government without just cause or a warrant. I remember in some states where police whould pull people over and start searching their cars. Courts moved to say that a car is a person's effects and therefore protected. So now they just couldn't go through your car just because they wanted. If a car is protected how can attaching a device and using GPS not be an invasion. It almost seems like he is saying if you use some kind of freeware tool then you can do anything with it. It is the act that is in question, not the tool.
The error of some people's argument in that GPS is everywhere or free, and driving on a public road means no privacy. If that is so they can just be old fashioned and follow you in your car without attaching anything to the car. The judge is sort of mistaken in saying they could have followed him therefore the GPS is the same thing. He is ignoring that the police trespassed on his property to put the device on his car. Law enforcement can not break the law to enforce the law. If something is illegal, just because technology makes it easier to do does not make it no longer illegal; illegality is not based on the ease of commiting the act. It is the job of the police to do the due dilligence, or whatever, to catch the criminal. Not make up a cheap PRECRIME division and catch you once you have done something.
Someone mentioned that GPS trackers usually need to be attached to the car power therefore they actually had to open or enter his car to attach it. That argument is not necessary since the fact that they altered his car without his consent for the purpose of tracking him without his consent.
There was some dumbass who said that the license was state property therefore they had the right to place anything the want behind that. It is either right or wrong for them to trespass on his property, only an idiot waste the time trying to divide the car up into discreet pieces where the law changes.
Using the judge's logic it is OK to commit a crime, or in his opinion for the cops to commit any crime for their purpose of building a case if they can commit it in a way that is less or not noticable at all.
As long as there are multiple ways to get some form of information they could get it anyway they want and then say we would have gotten the info some other way but we took a short cut.
Euphemism, what is that a euphemism for something.
They police have the right to look in on suspicious activity but they do not have the right to harass you indefinitely. Police departments have been sued for harassment for pulling the same people over and over again for DWB.
If the guy new his car was BUGGED then he sure would not have been driving with drugs in his car. And bugging should require a warrant.
I think this all stems from the erosion of right following the Patriot Act. Law enforcement now have this large umbrella to act under, they have now begun to move into non-terrorist fields and abusing rights. Any attempt to abridge law enforcement is looked upon as aiding the evil-doers.
We are being asked to give up freedom for protection; you know the rest. Are we still able to question law enforcement about their activities.
Euphemism, what is that a euphemism for something.
Everyone forfits about half the bill of rights now whenever you get behind the wheel of car.
The - "its a privilage - not a right" - argument is always trotted out on stories like these.
Its always interesting to see how government reacts to things they call "privilages" - they immediately curtail rights in a very predictable kneejerk fashion.
This is why governments suck and (as our founding fathers knew) you need to keep an iron boot of restraint on the neck of government otherwise you end up being abused.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I'll tell you where I expect privacy, got it?