Slashdot Mirror
GPS Tracking Without a Warrant Declared Legal
jnaujok writes "The Ninth Circuit court has declared that attaching a GPS tracker to your car, as it sits in your driveway, or by extension on a public street, and then using it to monitor every one of your movements, is totally legal, and can be performed by the police without needing a warrant. So, if you live in the Western United States, big brother has arrived."
http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/
Then they won't see ya!
You are looking at this wrong, here in the USA the laws do not tell us what we can do, they tell us what we can not do.
So, if it is not considered a violation of the 5th amendment and there is no law saying "You can not attach GPS devices to police cars" or "You can not monitor police" or any variation there of, then it is legal.
The trend is towards cellular phone style devices; GSM or CDMA radios with GPS unit. No keypad or screen required so they can be quite small. Battery life is an issue, however they go to sleep of they aren't moving so they only need to work for the duration of a trip.
This has already been circumvented.
So the cops are going after lay citizens and stupid crooks, a fair number of which really do deserve to be caught.
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/opinions/view_subpage.php?pk_id=0000010204
I am a law abiding citizen
Until they decide you aren't.
It would cost about $300 for the tracker. The receiver would be about $1000. I used to work at a place that tracked animals via GPS / VHF collars for wildlife researchers. There were a few cases where the animal would look, shall we say, rather humanoid, but in all of those cases that was a willing animal.
Anyway, that $300 would get you a GPS unit with antenna, a processor board with memory, and a VHF transmitter that sends out the location. They'd be able to read that location on the receiver. The battery would be a Lithium cell and would run for up to a year. It would be potted for weather proofing. If they had reusable batteries, then you'd be able to use the units pretty much indefinitely.
It could also be set up to record your location throughout the day at intervals no finer than 1/second. (Civilian GPS refreshes that fast, and there's no way they could get their hands on milspec.) It could easily save up the data and broadcast it at a set time (like 3am when you're asleep or 4pm when you're at work) and the receiver would get all the locations you've been in the last day. It only takes about 8 bytes to store a GPS location, so an 8Mbit Flash module is enough to store a year's worth of locations. This would all be on a board roughly 1" x 1.5" x 0.5", plus battery and antenna.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has also ruled that a warrant is required. Reported here on /. less than 20 days ago.
This decision is bound for the SCOTUS because you can not have different laws in one part of the country as compared to another part due to the Equal Protection Clause.
The Ninth is the most over-ruled circuit in the entire country. Stay tuned.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.