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Secret GPS Tracking Now Legal In Massachusetts
dr. fuzz writes "The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ruled in favor of John Law tracking you with secret GPS devices in Massachusetts provided a warrant is obtained. You've been warned. To the dissenters' credit, Justice Ralph Gants is quoted with 'Our constitutional analysis should focus on the privacy interest at risk from contemporaneous GPS monitoring, not simply the property interest.'"
Requires court order. Who has a problem with that? With a court order you can tap phones, plant bugs, install keystroke loggers, just about anything. Seems kinda daft to be maming a fuss about putting a GPS on somebody's car, hell just use the court order to get the cell company to give a feed from their phone.
Democrat delenda est
I guess if its too much of a problem you could buy one of these things.... http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8758 at a little under 27 USD with no taxes and no shipping I imagine its cheaper then the tracking device.
To be fair, that's a lot better than in Wisconsin, where they use secret GPS devices to track you without a warrant.
Suddenly I foresee these becoming much more popular, and then much less legal (if they even are to begin with).
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What...is this April 1? Massachusetts isn't big enough to get lost in, much less require a tracking device to find her if she goes off-leash...I mean, someone.
if you have one of these under your car or something? i assume they all use ordinary mobile phone networks to phone home but where do they usually put it, can it be anywhere under the car?
So why the hell do you keep falling for, "But we MEAN well when we take YOUR money!"
Maybe they do - for NOW.
So, so far, in Massachusetts, it's illegal to leave Lite Brites out, illegal to wear a shirt with LEDs on it, illegal to do chemistry at home, illegal to delete spam email(!!) , and now it's legal to secretly track people with GPS systems?!
What the hell is wrong with that state?
Police can do almost anything by with a warrant. However, I would argue that if there is probable cause to track a vehicle with a gps tracking that it can be done without a warrant.
Your car doesn't necessarily mean you, in fact in Manhattan, NY, most people don't use their own transportation, and as far as I know, most crimes nowadays are emerging from there :)
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.. for more car theft now. Criminal steals your car, commits crime, and you're pretty much toast.
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Jam the GPS tracking with an on-board EMF field.
How is it that a police officer can enter your vehicle or home without a warrant if he or she believes a crime has been, is being, or will be committed?
How is it that a police officer can run 24/7 surveillance of video and audio without a warrant when he or she is investigating a suspected crime?
How is it that a police officer can tow a vehicle, search a vehicle, or even confiscate a vehicle whithout a warrant when he or she believes it has been used in the commission of a crime?
But, they can't track a vehicle without a warrant???
Slashdot News Flash! If the cops obtain a warrant, they can do stuff they can't do otherwise!
Personally, I don't even think a warrant should be necessary, but MA has gone above and beyond here and required one. If your house can be searched, your phone tapped, your DNA scanned, your financial records checked, etc., with a warrant, why not a tracking device on your car?
SirWired
Advocates of this sort of thing say it is like having a police officer tail a person of interest. I'm sorry but it is not at all like that.
Prior to tracking by GPS, if the police wanted to track someone, they had to assign an officer, or multiple officers, to track him. This is the world we lived with, and this world is the context in which we reasoned about whether or not cops should be allowed to tail someone. I'm sure there was very little debate, if any, but that was because the scarcity of police relative to the population was a limit as to how many people the police could tail. It did not occur to us that the police would start tailing everybody, or even very many people. It was simply unimaginable that they would have the resources to invade the public's privacy
With the advent of GPS, we are now in a completely different economic-political context requiring that we must reconsider the issue and not simply continue right along with the policies put in place in a different world.
Where once police had to carefully consider whether or not it was worth the expenditure of their limited manpower to tail a person, they now no longer have to. Where once privacy protections were taken for granted by the very nature of what tailing people required, they can no longer be. It is reasonable to consider the possibility that GPS tracking could become widespread for all sorts of issues that would be considered minor, today. The police, as the costs of such tracking drop, will ask themselves "Why not?" The cost to society will be an enormous loss of privacy.
Don't let anyone try to tell you that there is no privacy issue because cops already tail people.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I have been wanting to buy a cellphone jammer. Add a GPS jammer to my Christmas Stocking...
Because there is a lot more possible abuse. For example, you have one of these things installed (chances are without your knowing) and a friend borrows your car and takes it somewhere that looks bad, they then use this "evidence" to frame you even though you weren't the person driving the car. Even worse, someone takes it off your car and puts it on a different car, etc. What happens if someone steals your car? This relies on the flawed argument that if someone is driving your car it -must- be you.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It talks about police and wiretapping so we'll get plenty of paranoid theories and the resulting jokes. Plus we're guaranteed a mangled Ben Franklin quote.
Ooh, ooh, I got one!
"I am BEN FRANKLIN, master of SEX and VOODOO!"
I'm not sure if it's exactly relevant to this discussion, though...
Bow-ties are cool.
"The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ruled in favor of John Law tracking you with secret GPS devices in Massachusetts provided a warrant is obtained."
Sounds like a warrant is needed to me.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Shit, why not just shoot you with a tranquilizer dart, install a tag in your ear and attach a radio transmitter collar around your neck? No warrant is required for doing this to wild animals, why should a warrant be required for humans?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
yea, was thinking the same thing...
According to a news post in boing boing and according to the manufacturer's website, it's for 50$
Slashdot News Flash! If the cops obtain a warrant, they can do stuff they can't do otherwise!
Yeah, it's like when Pacman eats the big dot...
Bow-ties are cool.
EXACTLY. This is what I have been saying for years. There has to be some limitation put on technology enforcing the law against men's actions rather than men enforcing the law against men's actions.
1. Remove GPS tracking device and attach to neighbor's car.
2. Have awesome alibis when neighbor goes somewhere
3. Profit?
And while they're at it, why don't they shoot you for food? Your analogy sucks.
It is nevertheless unsettling because you knew when the cops searched your house, and you could hide things or secure communications. Secret location monitoring is a centerpiece of government oppression since it interferes with the right to assembly and movement. The cops are not here to help you. These devices might see some use in the "war against drugs" which is of questionable legitimacy, but every other use will be the illegitimate tracking of innocent citizens.
It is news when a new massive power is given to the authorities. Authorities may or may not have "torture warrants" or "kidnapping warrants" or "disappearance warrants" already, but that wouldn't be of any interest to you!
Or if we use a car analogy, they could attach a gps tracker to your car while you aren't looking.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
And here I was thinking on how Massachusetts is our most liberal state, and Liberals as a rule are for privacy and totally against domestic spying.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think it is absolutely critical to distinguish between a warrant-based system for Evidence Gathering by Law Enforcement and a system of Intelligence Gathering by Military Offices. Wire-tapping without a warrant to introduce evidence in a criminal prosecution is a no-no. It is, however, completely distinct from gather intelligence or recon data abroad to target enemy soldiers, spies, and saboteurs. If somebody a valid target to be shot up by a predator drone without a trial then bugging their phone calls isn't really a 4th Amendment issue.
MA state and local policy investigators are part of Law Enforcement and thus all their searches, seizures, wiretaps, and electronic monitoring are subject to warrant requirements.
While it might seem like a reasonable law at first glance, realize that unreasonable things usually come to pass in small increments. In five years, you'll have a GPS planted on your car because you've had a speeding ticket at some point in the past, and some day you'll receive a number of citations automatically generated from a computer that used the GPS tracking info to record every time you exceed 65 MPH on route 93.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8758
$26 GPS blocker. Or you can splurge and get the $80 mini version that plugs into the cigarette lighter.
Maybe I should release some counter-espionage blue-print gadgets to really make law enforcement agencies think twice about doing this. Who's your daddy now 22SAS muuuuuuuuuuhahahahhaaaa,.
All cows eat grass!
If the police had enough evidence to get the warrant to put the GPS on your car, they're probably watching you and will be able to see if your friend borrows your car. [I could see if you were a suspect in a kidnapping or a murder, they'd want to track you to see if you visited your victim, without risking losing your car in traffic.]
I would assume it would be locked to the frame of your car somehow, to prevent you from easily disconnecting it. And if your car is stolen, I would assume you'd report to the police that someone stole it and thus there'd be a record.
From the 4th amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
For example: if they think you have a dead body in your broom closet, they can get a search warrant authorizing a search of your broom closet for a dead body. They are not allowed to turn that into a general fishing expedition to search anyplace you might ever have been, for anything they decide is suspicious as they find it. They have to state in advance what they're looking for and where they are going to look.
GPS tracking seems like the opposite of that: by definition they don't state the location ahead of time, or describe particularly what it is that they are going to seize.
of course the police could always fabricate the evidence for a warrant. Thankfully there are a few people around like Kopbusters nailing them on video for fictional evidence on a search warrant.
Misclicked while moderating, now posting to undo
Personally, I don't even think a warrant should be necessary, but MA has gone above and beyond here and required one. If your house can be searched, your phone tapped, your DNA scanned, your financial records checked, etc., with a warrant, why not a tracking device on your car?
Everyone pay attention, because this is what happens when they don't teach Civics correctly in school.
Next thing you'll be telling me that with a warrant the police can secretly wiretap someone's phone, secretly look up details, secretly set up surveillance, and other secret things, all without telling the suspect that they are doing these things. Telling the suspect wouldn't make these techniques useless, so I can't imagine them being done in secret.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8758
Remember that GPS signals are very, very weak. I have tested one of these, and it completely blocked a very sensitive SirfStar III -based receiver within a 5-meter range. The transmit power is actually much less than in a typical cell phone, so they are legal in my country.
Buy two if you're really paranoid..
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
I assume you are remarking about my comment that I don't think a warrant should be necessary.
The reason I think this is because your car can already be clandestinely followed and tracked with no permission needed from anybody. A cop (or private citizen, for that matter) in an unmarked car can legally follow you all over town, record your movements, heck, even publish them on the internet if he wants, all on a whim.
If doing it in an expensive, manpower-intensive, failure-prone way is perfectly legal to do for any reason whatsoever, I think probable cause should be enough to stick something to the inside of your fender.
SirWired
Just about any evidence can be fabricated. Fingerprints can be planted, "eyewitnesses" can be fooled with a disguise, DNA can be planted, etc. This is not a reason to exclude it entirely.
Are you saying we should never hear testimony from witnesses, ever, because it is so easy for them to lie? Kind of hard to have a trial without witnesses.
If the cops arrest you based on evidence obtained via a tracking device, then your attorney can counter with any of the defenses you mentioned.
SirWired
This is pretty scary sounding in the Big Brother way, but extremely easy to defeat.
A GPS only works with a clear view of the sky... that means, your GPS bug needs an antenna somewhere, you can't simply hide the whole thing under a car.
You also need a backchannel -- cellular modem or whatever you have access too... police and Feds probably have their own private frequencies to use, but then they'd have the problem of range... you're not going very far on high frequencies at all, or low frequencies without a pretty obvious antenna. So you can probably bet most would use cellular modems, unless they also have you under active surveillance.
Both GPS and cellular are crazy-easy to jam. GPS in particular.. GPS chips are built with a -140dB or so input sensitivity. There are no naturally occurring noise sources at GPS frequencies, but you could build a tiny, very low power noise source and keep any GPS signals from working near your car. In fact, you can probably just buy one of these easily enough:
http://boingboing.net/2009/07/30/gps-jammer-plugs-int.html
http://www.gpsjammers.net/gmc07.html
Yeah, guess you can. These are all blocking the L1 band for consumer GPS, not the military band, but chances are, that's good enough to block the police, and the military frequencies aren't any more difficult to block, if perhaps less off-the-shelf. Same goes with cellular jammers... you can buy these pretty easily.
Now, obviously, the Good Guys hope that the Bad Guys are not as smart about these things... and they won't be, initially. But soon enough.
-Dave Haynie
Gants concurred (agreed with the court, but on different grounds), he did not dissent. Also, he's probably wrong.
http://www.technicallylegal.org/de-fud-ma-gps-tracking-case/
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
There are a few things that have always bugged me about the whole "you don't have any privacy in public" justification crap that police departments who use these devices have tried to ram down our troughs. First off, to even place the devices they have to violate personal property (unless they have a warrant). If I put something in or take something from a strangers car with its windows open I can very easily be arrested for it (trespassing, theft, ect). Why does the underbody of a car not qualify? After all, If you spray paint "Bastard" on the side of someones car (even if its in some wash away paint) you'd see the inside of a jail cell pretty quick, how is that any different than placing a foreign device on someones car that constantly spies on you. And then there's a little question of role reversal, Does anyone want to venture a guess what would happen to me If I secretly placed GPS tracking devices on a bunch of police cars, collected location data on them, and the dumped that data out onto the net a few months later. If you said "You'd be in prison the next day getting to know Bruno", You win a prize! Where is the law saying they can do it but I can't? New powers should only be given to the government (in this case Law Enforcement) reluctantly, while the requirement of a warrant is a step in the right direction, even with a warrant this capability is ripe for extreme abuse, and if it is to be used at all, requires far more extensive protections (a two month limit and notification (of the individual being tracked) requirement would be a good start).