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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.
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!
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.
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?
It's even worse than that. "Bugging" a car in this way is not as straightforward as many people think. It's unlikely they even did it without opening the doors. I used to work for a company that did vehicle tracking, including covert law enforcement use such as the one described, and for "bait-cars" that were left out for people to steal.
It's not like they're just slapping a tiny magnetic device to the undercarriage of the vehicle.
The biggest problems are the GPS antenna and the power supply. A small battery won't last any longer powering the unit than your mobile phone would without being recharged, so for long term surveillance you need to tap into the vehicle's power supply. That means you need to mount it where you can splice into the vehicle's power lines--for example, we'd sometimes mount ours inside the frame of a door (if it has power windows or locks) or concealed under the dash if there was enough space (usually there isn't).
As for the GPS antenna, it requires line-of-sight to 3 or more overhead satellites, meaning you need to "see" a good chunk of the sky with it. You can mount it under plastic or glass, but if you tried to mount it under steel you'd lose reception. What's often done to conceal it is to mount the antenna under the car's plastic dash or within the bumper, if the bumper is made at least partially of plastic or rubber. You only need about a square inch or two of surface-area to mount a tiny patch antenna underneath.
There's also power circuitry (to clean up the vehicle's 12v line), logic circuitry, and a mobile phone or other transmitter included with the tracker. A common misconception is that only a GPS receiver is needed, but GPS receivers are just that--receivers. They receive signals from the GPS satellites, they don't transmit anything back to the satellites. You need to accommodate relaying the vehicle position to your monitoring station through other means such as an SMS-enabled radio (phone).
If you don't integrate all this onto a single PCB (we didn't), then this is a whole lot of electronics to mount in the vehicle. Even if it is on one PCB, you've got the circuit board, power cable running to the source, a transmitter antenna plus it's cable running to the mounting spot, and a GPS patch-antenna plus it's cable running to a limited-position mounting spot. It's not easy to conceal all this stuff, mount it where vibration and weather won't harm it, and accommodate the GPS antenna's restrictions. I'm sure that's why they did this when the guy was out of town--so they could rip his car apart for a couple hours while they installed it.
As you can imagine it's not just intrusive with regard to privacy. It's very physically intrusive as well.
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.