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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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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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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.
Fortunately, in Massachusetts, we all ride bicycles. I think they put it on the handlebars or something.
guess again, sales of Preparation H(tm) were up 8% in Massachusetts last month and nitrile gloves 10%. they probe and plant while you sleep
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.
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.
Did you actually read the links you provided or do you just like making over-the-top sensationalist comments?
re: deleting spam e-mail: yes, for work e-mail accounts used by municipal (and presumably state -- the article is a little vague) employees within the State of Massachusetts only to remain in compliance with FOIA laws. In other words, if you subpoena the muni, they have to be able to provide the e-mails requested for a period of two years. IOW, not anywhere near as big a deal as you implied, because this doesn't affect private e-mail accounts. IMHO, transparency in the government is a GOOD THING.
re: LiteBrites: if you leave an apparently improvised electronic circuit of unknown purpose abandoned in public places, the cops may very well investigate to determine if it is a public hazard (i.e., a bomb). While I think they probably went a little over the top in this case, your implication is that if you leave a LiteBrite on your front porch, the police are going to come arrest you. Somehow I suspect that even the police in Massachusetts aren't that inane. Considering how many business put flashy-blinkies in their windows and on the streets in just about any town in the country -- including Massachusetts -- I think you are blowing that event waaaaaay out of proportion to claim that it is "illegal to leave Lite Brites out."
re: shirt with LEDs on it: yeah, the reaction to this event was probably a little over the top as well, although I think it is fair to say that Star Simpson didn't exactly display good judgment either. Considering the culture of fear that the government has cultivated, you don't have to be a genius to think that waltzing into an airport with a homemade circuit on a breadboard with a wad of putty in your hand, then walking away when the ticket counter agent asks about the device might raise concern about what you are doing. I don't condone all the paranoia, but given that such fear exists (and, groan, is encouraged), what she did was simply stupid. Furthermore, I have seen lots of t-shirts (and tennis shoes) with LEDs integrated into them that wouldn't raise an eyebrow, so again, what you are implying ("you can't wear shirts with LEDs!!!") is not really true.
re: chemistry at home: okay, yeah, I agree with you on this one. That was just stupid of the government and most likely, in my non-expert (i.e., IANAL), opinion, an abuse of power.
re: GPS tracking: yes, with proper court oversight -- which was part of the ruling in this case -- I don't have a problem with that. The moment it happens without judicial review, however, it becomes an abuse of power.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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
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.
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.
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.
Actually, that is in dispute. She says that she responded to the clerk, turned the lights off and tried to calm down the clerk who was freaking out. The "clay" was a baked sculpture of a flower that she was carrying to give to the friend that she was meeting.
I'd say that calling the police over somebody with flashing lights, or a red hat, or a leather jacket (all of which have equal relevance to terrorism or bombs) constitutes flying into a panic.
Just to be clear, this was not a TSA checkpoint, or a secure area--it was a counter in the outer atrium, full of people with uninspected suitcases, any one of which could hold enough explosive to kill everybody in the room.