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Warrantless GPS Tracking Is Legal, Says WI Court
PL/SQL Guy writes "A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."
... it was dark, this guy was attaching a device to the underside of my truck that looked like a bomb. So I shot him.
Have gnu, will travel.
This sounds like a crazy decision, but the WI judge isnt making any new law here (not that the law is correct.) In fact, police have always been able to do this, because citizens have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" when they are in public. 4th amendment law rarely protects anyone when they are outside in public, with the rare exceptions of when their bags or persons are protected from search and/or seizure (that is, if a search or seizure has occurred.) If you are interested more in this crackpot area of the law, see US v. Katz and its wide ranging progeny, especially US v. Knotts (electronic tracking devices, no reasonable expectation of privacy in your location).
How can warrantless GPS tracking be legal while warrantless car searching is illegal.
Police don't need a warrant to follow a car, and in my opinion, GPS tracking is more akin to tailing a car than searching through it. I'm not thrilled by this ruling, but it doesn't seem blatantly unconstitutional.
As a lawyer in Wisconsin, I can tell you that this decision is pretty meaningless. I have had several cases go to the court of appeals (this court) and you almost always lose there on novel issues like this one. Til the WI supreme court rules takes this and rules or denies further appeal, this is not news. For some reason our CoA's don't like making big splashes, they will almost always just side with the state.
So when/if I find such a device on my car it belongs to me doesn't it? And I'm not giving it back. And I'm not paying any bill they send me.
Now suppose they just put these devices on everyone's car, and used them to send remote speeding tickets and other such nonsense...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
In some places, and for some people, standard advice if you find a "device" attached to your car is to call out the bomb (disposal) squad...
Now doing that for a police gps tracker is going to waste a lot of police time but finding an unknown device under your car is legitiamte reason to call them out. In the US you could probably then sue them for emotional distress or something for thinking someone has put a bomb under your car. That would probably be more lucrative than ebaying the tracker as well...
Since the police are using his own property (the vehicle) for a public purpose (the tracking/investigation), they need at least probable cause and more likely a warrant to satisfy both procedural and substantive due process. If you read the article, you should take notice that this was essentially the argument that the ACLU spokesperson made without explicitly mentioning the 5th Amendment.
There's also an "unreasonable interference" due process argument.
Unfortunately, failing to raise the appropriate argument in the lower court may be construed as a waiver unless the defendant can demonstrate incompetent council.
'Poor (evil stalker) guy is probably screwed.
When over time GPS tracking becomes "normal observational techniques", would the police not then be able to ticket the driver for speeding? Right now a police cruiser that is tailing someone can give them a ticket for speeding. If GPS tracking is thought of as the same as tailing, why would it be different. Right now people may see a difference, how about in 10 years? how about 25 years?
Right now there is a limit on how many people can be trailed by a cruiser based on actual numbers of the police force. How does this translate to GPS tracking? Seems like some over zealous politician could get thru funding to have one tracker per citizen.
Police have always been able to 'tail' suspects. I feel this is no different.
Except that tailing you does not need them to "secretly attach a GPS device" on your property. Yep. Not different at all.
How about skipping the car and implanting the tracker on, say, your shoulder? Or if that's too invasive, require you to carry the device at all times?
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Or better yet, putting GPS on police cars.
This is actually a very good idea. With all these invasions of privacy imposed on citizens, the police should be subjected to such surveillance as well. How about civilian squads monitoring the movements and actions of police units? Think of it as a kind of inverted neighbourhood watch. Whenever a cop roughs someone up, a police-watcher would be there with a camera to put it all on tape. Try to negate that in court!
I've always felt that way about how they sometimes use canine units to search for drugs. At least in the USA, it would be illegal for a cop to randomly search your car for no reason even if he did find drugs. But if that same officer has a dog and the dog starts barking at your car, he can now legally charge you with whatever contraband he finds. To me those two situations are exactly alike; the dog in this case is just the device with which the search is performed. Yet one is legal and the other is not.
I guess you might call this legalism or Phariseeism, in that both situations are the same except for a minor technicality. Because of that technicality (whether the cop uses his own eyes to search or the dog's nose to do the same thing) they're somehow considered completely different situations for which different rules are applied. I can't imagine that any judge or other authority who actually respects freedom would ever support this. I have to assume that all of these fine distinctions and splitting of hairs are to provide excuses so that the cops can do whatever it is they want to do while completely ignoring the intent behind the Fourth Amendment.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
What we ought to be asking for is for some clever engineering /. reader to develop and market a device that can find a GPS unit on your vehicle.
Already done, and cheaply. Just purchase an R.F. field strength meter, a common tool for those in amateur radio and radio communications in general. There are a wide variety of models and price-points.
They are relatively simple and cheap to build yourself, especially for frequencies under 500mHz. Here's a rather fancy LED-bar indicator design with plenty of sensitivity and good to ~2gHz that won't break the bank found in a Google search:
http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/wireless/pics/LED_sig_meter.png
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Unfortunately, police are granted many powers that citizens are not given.
Just try to hold someone against their will and search them, for example. Or wear a gun on your hip here in Chicago. Or force someone off the road. Or force a hooker to service you with the threat of arrest.
By the way, I live near the Chicago Police Academy and walk my dog by there regularly. A few weeks ago, there were two huge Blackwater semis there and their were a bunch of dudes in paramilitary gear with no insignias giving training to police cadets.
It's comforting to know that we now have mercenaries training police. It's bad enough that we allow these mercenaries to represent the US in armed conflict. I wonder if besides their (extremely high) salaries they are allowed all the plunder and rape they want. Thank you, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for renewing and rewarding this great tradition.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You'd think video evidence would be enough to expose and convict police officers on a power trip. But a look at the Robert Dziekanski case that many Canadians have been following for the past year and a half shows otherwise. There is a video of the incident that has been made public by a witness at the scene. Immediately after the incident, the RCMP made multiple statements that were blatantly inconsistent with the video evidence (e.g., it was originally claimed that Dziekanski kept throwing objects around after the RCMP arrived, which was conclusively shown to be false by the video.) and testimony from other emergency response personnel (e.g., the RCMP claimed that an officer was properly monitoring Dziekanski's vitals until medical help arrived. It turned out that the officer in question did not renew his expired first aid certification, and a fireman later testified that the RCMP officers barred him from any attempt to check Dziekanski's vitals.). The Crown prosecutors opted to not pursue criminal charges related to the death of Robert Dziekanski. There is an inquiry investigating the circumstances in the case that is currently underway, but the prosecutors have thus far maintained that there is no reasonable prospect of conviction. In fact, the RCMP threatened not to participate in the inquiry until the Crown decided whether or not to pursue criminal charges.
Of course, the whole situation has not been resolved yet, as the judge overseeing the inquiry may be able to make recommendations based on his findings. But this situation has left many Canadians with very shaky feelings about the RCMP force as a whole.
And to drive the point home even further: They don't have to negate video evidence in court if they can keep it out of court.
Police got a warrant to put a GPS on his car and secretly attached it while the vehicle was parked in Sveum's driveway. The device recorded his car's movements for five weeks before police retrieved it and downloaded the information. Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police
The tracker is a receiver/recorder, unless the IF is leaking badly, the field strength meter is useless.
Most of the smaller/cheaper GPS receivers that I've seen aren't all that well shielded and would leak enough of the LO (local oscillator) from the receivers' mixer to be detectable within 2-3 feet by an amplified FSM, which is what I was thinking.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.