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Secret GPS Tracking Now Legal In Massachusetts

Posted by timothy on from the unsecret-kind-requires-anklet dept.

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.'"

7 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Where is the controversy? by jmorris42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Democrat delenda est
    1. Re:Where is the controversy? by locallyunscene · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't worry, we can manufacture all the controversy we need with this story. In truth, it's the perfect /. article. It references Massachusetts in a negative light so someone can make a snide comment about the MIT student who walked into the airport with a circuit board on her chest, or the Mooninite advertising stunt, or even that NDA/tech company comparison between California and Massachusetts article from a couple of weeks ago. Then someone else can link the actual articles and, boom, 6 plus five insightful/informative comments right there.

      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.

      It directly mentions the constitution so we might even get the lingering Ron Paul supporter! I've missed those guys.

    2. Re:Where is the controversy? by hardburn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Which is an inherent problem with expanding the powers of the executive branch. Even if there's a lot of complaining about it at the time, there's not much incentive for the next guy to back out of those powers once they've been established. There was lots of complaining from some Republicans when Clinton made the FISA court into a rubber-stamping operation after Oklahoma City, but then they ignored FISA entirely after 9/11.

      More on topic, I don't see much problem with giving the police broad crime fighting powers, provided there is proper oversight for abuse. A good warrant system can do that, and need not be much of a time burden if the right procedures are in place. But there better be something. Even the rubber-stamping FISA court at least created a paper trail.

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      Not a typewriter
    3. Re:Where is the controversy? by swanzilla · · Score: 5, Informative

      Call me a troll, but I'd like to remind everyone that what W started, the O is continuing...

      I won't call you a troll, but I'll remind you that neither Bush nor Obama had any hand in composing the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which spelled out what was considered unreasonable search and seizure. The appointing of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court members is also completely independant of the Executive Branch.

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      0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
  2. To be fair... by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    To be fair, that's a lot better than in Wisconsin, where they use secret GPS devices to track you without a warrant.

  3. Here's the problem by mariox19 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.

  4. Reasonable? by Pro923 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.