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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.'"
Suddenly I foresee these becoming much more popular, and then much less legal (if they even are to begin with).
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Exactly. The Massachusetts decision makes sense: If you can show probable cause, you can intrude upon a person's privacy, but *only* if you show probable cause. Wisconsin decided that privacy is subordinate to police effectiveness. Problem is, you follow that track too far and you end up with a police state and no rights to speak of. The police don't *intend* to violate your rights, they simply do whatever is allowable to uphold their mandate (keeping the peace). If you don't restrict the range of allowable activities, and they can use technology to supplement their numbers, upholding their mandate most effectively requires them to scan every phone call, track every car, open all mail, etc.
Technology allows quantitative differences to become qualitative differences: Police can already tail anyone on a public street. But limited numbers mean they are only able to do so for a small number of people, so they tend to have good reasons when they do tail. But if you can track every car effortlessly and keep a database of movements, you can go on fishing expeditions. Someone dumped a body on the side of a highway? Quick, pull up the logs and find every person who passed that stretch of highway recently. Then demand DNA and fingerprint samples from all of them (assuming you haven't already collected them). It's effective, at the cost of invading everyone's privacy.
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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
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.