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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
Not if you plug it into the cigarette lighter socket :)
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 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.
The jammer is a big red arrow that points straight at you. That sort of defeats the purpose if you want to remain inconspicuous.
They didn't "fly into a panic". She didn't just walk into an airport with a blinking light attached to her.
She walked into an airport with a blinking electronic device AND DELIBERATELY IGNORED A SIMPLE QUESTION ASKED TO HER BY AN AIRPORT EMPLOYEE. That is either stupid ("I don't have to deal with airport employees") or arrogant ("Airport employees are beneath my level of acknowledgement") or both.
That employee reported the situation, which is hardly "fly[ing] into a panic".
The police came to investigate the situation, knowing in advance that they were dealing with an uncooperative subject.
Nobody panicked. The nitwit with the blinky was a nitwit and acted like one. "She goes to MIT so she's socially incompetent" isn't an excuse. It is rarely smart to act like a nitwit when dealing with security issues, but enough people do that they have to put up signs that warn that jokes about bombs are not funny at TSA checkpoints.