Slashdot Mirror
Police Secretly Planting GPS Devices On Cars
bfwebster writes "The Washington Post has a long investigative article on how more and more police departments are secretly planting GPS tracking devices on the cars of people they are investigating — usually without a warrant. After-the-fact court challenges on this technique have largely upheld such use of a GPS device, though the Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that a warrant is required."
If you RTFA, you'll see a poll asking if people approve this tactic. As of right now, 55% do.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day? If yes then I believe this should require a warrant. Else, what's the diff except it costs much less and is more discrete.
The problem is twofold:
1. If they damage your car, that is vandalism/destruction of private property.
2. If they find some sort of incriminating evidence and are on private property without a warrant then that evidence is inadmissible in court.
Therefore it's prudent and not trespassing when they do this. Until then, those pricks in the van otside can waste all the gas they want.
When a police officer is tracking you, do they hitch a ride without telling you?
Let's suppose that an officer on the street can observe me in my house by looking through the window. Is the police officer then justified in mounting a camera to the side of my house and pointing it in the window without first obtaining a warrant?
I think most people would agree that the police do not have the right to mount a camera to my house, building, or any other structure without my consent or a court issued warrant.
If mounting the camera to my house is not allowed, why are they allowed to mount other foreign objects (GPS) to my moveable property (car) without a warrant?
Whether reasonably measurable or not, they are, without my express authorization or compensation, using energy from my vehicle and causing additional wear and tear on my vehicle. This could be construed as theft of service (transportation fees).
No if a private citizen does it they go to jail. If it is known to be illegal will any police officers go to jail for doing this? Of course not. Will their commanding officers be removed from police force for negligence of duty in allowing those under them to use illegal tactics? Of course not. Do the police give a shit if this is illegal, if they only get caught occasionally and when they do the suffer no personal penalties? Of course not.
We are all just people.
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day? If yes then I believe this should require a warrant. Else, what's the diff except it costs much less and is more discrete.
No, they don't need a warrant to tail you, your whereabouts in public places isn't considered a search, but public information. However...
The Sixth Circuit held in the Baily case, of attaching a beeper (rather than GPS, c.1980), that merely analogizing with tailing isn't sufficient to decide the issue, it's one of reasonable expectation of privacy.
The judge in the 7th circuit Garcia case wrote :
Personally, I read that as a warning, not a suggestion, but it's what he feels the law allows for. I'm slowly being persuaded by Moore's Law that perhaps a Constitutional Amendment clarifying the right to privacy (which many of us feels already exists in the 4th amendment) would be an OK thing. Now, to get Congress to pass that (ha!).
Bruce Schneier argues for the requirements of warrants for these kinds of tracking, to prevent rampant growth and abuse of the police state.
Fortunately for the police state, citizens are voluntarily loading up their cars with tracking devices (EZ Pass, Tire Pressure Monitors, OnStar), so they don't have to even bother installing a GPS device in some cases. Sure, everybody knows that cell phones can be tracked, but how many people know that federally-mandated tire pressure monitoring systems send out a unique 'MAC' for every wheel?
What's gotten people burned in several cases I've read about is that they were driving vehicles they didn't own, and the courts make a distinction there. Does the car you regularly drive have your name on the title or your wife's? That's exactly what got one guy's 4th amendment defense thrown out - his wife 'owned' the car he used, so they weren't tracking his property and he didn't have standing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day?
If they do it for very long I'm betting you'd have a harassment case.
what's the diff except it costs much less and is more discrete.
Well, at the risk of repeating you, it costs less, which means there is no natural inhibition to them doing it on a large scale, and it's more discrete, which means the public is unable to connect with it as an issue for discussion.
The cost / large scale surveillance issue is ultimately an extension of reasonable expectation of privacy. While a person does not have a reasonable expectation to never be seen when out driving around, they do (at least IMO) have a reasonable expectation to not have their entire route history recorded.
The public awareness issue is a simple matter of who is watching the watchers. The public should know how many of these things are in use and (after a blackout period to allow temporary covert surveillance) who they are being used on. The reason is accountability; if the people decide they don't want this, their wishes must be obeyed. But the people cannot express an informed opinion about that which they cannot see.
A black & white following a car around is a public statement, "We are watching you." A GPS device with no warrant is also a statement, "We don't want you to know how much we're watching you." I don't trust a "Democracy" that doesn't want me to know what it is doing (after a reasonable black-op period of course, maybe maxing out at something like a year or two) in my name.
"The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted." - James Madison
I figure Madison was a pretty sharp guy, and he spent literally years discussing and forming his concepts with other heroes of our history. You can study the causes for his views in such pieces as Common Sense and The Federalist Papers, or you can just respect his credentials. But if you haven't spent a few years studying the topic, you should beware that the risks he wanted to avoid are not just hypothetical.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They don't need a warrant.
Essentially, the police can make any observations they want, provided they do it from a vantage point they have a right to be. They can, for example, make aerial observations of your home provided they don't fly lower than is normal or prudent.
A cop can watch you walk across a public square. He can even note this down if he wants to. Technology adds the wrinkle that he doesn't necessarily have to be in the square to do this. He can use surveillance cameras. Or a computer with face recognition software.
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses. Well times change, and technology changes, and with it the kinds of abuses that are possible.
The law as we inherited it from our forbears assumes that surveillance is too costly to employ frivolously, and that therefore the government has a strong disincentive to use it; and if it is used there is an assumption the government has a strong incentive to stop. And this was true for a long time. As a consequence, suspicion is viewed from a legal standpoint as something more benign than it really is. Suspicion leads to investigation which either leads to exoneration or an indictment. Failing either of these results probably meant that there just wasn't enough investigation possible given the resources and time available.
Anyhow, that's how you can fall onto a terrorist watch list and the onus is on you to get yourself off and if the system keeps dropping you on it, tough luck for you. The possibility of cheap, automated suspicion is something that would never have occurred to the founders.
The new frontier of tyranny is the use of widespread, unpredictable surveillance, not for gathering information, but for exerting social control. The Chinese are masters of this. Under this form of tyranny, you end up internalizing whatever rules the masters want.
There is nothing specific in the Constitution that keeps the government from using technology to watch, catalog and cross reference every movement of every member of the population, provided that the information is obtained legally. Legally would include any observations they make from a public place, or can buy from a private source. And since surveillance is clearly one of the things the government is empowered to do, and such uses of surveillance aren't expressly forbidden, there is a school of Constitutional thought that says this is allowable.
Fortunately, this kind of literalist reading of the Constitution is not yet the prevailing one.
With respect to the GPS on the car -- that could be an interesting Constitutional case, although not one I'd like to see before this court. But then, you never know. It reminds me of a case a few years back in which the police used thermal imaging of a suspect's home walls as probable cause to support a (successful) search for a marijuana garden. The arguments were all over the place as you might imagine, but Scalia, if I recall, was one of those who thought this was probably not allowable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Would you trust /.?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/05/1730239
"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.
found this too: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2334039
If you really think about this statement, I think you'll find it to be demonstrably false.
If you actually research this statement instead of taking a knee jerk reaction, I know you'll find that speed variance IS the culprit, established by many studies. You might also find that the recommended speed limits are at a speed such that 85% of the cars will be under it, that raising and lowering speed limits away from that 85% level has very little effect on speeds, and that jurisdictions set speed limits away from the 85% level as a response to lack of revenue or to give residents a false sense of something being done.
Go ahead. Look it up. Here's a clue: FHWA-RD-92-084
Infuriate left and right
So what's your theory about New Rome, Ohio?
60 residents, 14 police officers, almost 3000 tickets issued a year.
So many in fact that AAA put up a billboard outside of town warning drivers about it.
Granted, an extreme example, but don't pretend it doesn't happen.