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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."
Other District Courts of appeals have ruled it illegal. Right now, it is illegal in Washington DC, but legal in California. Time for Kagan to show us what she's made of.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I agree with you and the dissenting Judge Kozinski (Regan appointee). Judge Kozinski said that the court was prejudiced against poor people, taking away their rights simply beause they could not afford a garage He was right, your driveway is your property, people have an expectation of privacy on it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I can understand why this decision turned out the way it did. Placing a tracking device on your vehicle is about the same as following you around with an unmarked vehicle. It's much harder to detect of course and so you might think you are unobserved when that's not true.
Anyways I can see this possibly creating a small market for GPS jamming devices. The legality of such devices of course would be questionable if not outright illegal.
The article actually covers the facts fairly well, but it would be much better if the writer didn't label every quote "conservative" or "liberal" with a seemingly naive understanding of the meaning of those terms. For example, when one judge points out that not enough poor people become judges, so they are underrepresented, he is labeled a "raging liberal." This comes from the oversimplified stereotype that liberals love the poor and conservatives hate them. I would expect this from radio or TV pundits, but not from Time magazine.
I think somebody should put GPS transmitters on the Ninth Circuit justices' cars immediately, and register wheremyjudgesat.com.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Okay, so, as a citizen of California, I have a question for the Slashdot techies out there. These GPS trackers that can be tacked onto my vehicle. How large are they? What do they resemble? Do they give off any transmission signal/EM radiation of some sort. I am personally appalled by this particular ruling, but if that's how things are going to be, then let the arms race begin. I want to know what, exactly, these GPS trackers do. Do they transmit your location data back to the GPS sat system? Or do they transmit to some kind of local receiver? Do we know that frequency they transmit on?
If the police and government are going to take active duty to track all citizens, without the burden of providing a reasonable level of suspect, then I say we, as citizens fight back for our rights. If the local police want to track our vehicles, what kind of devices can we hack together to detect these nasty little tracker chips? There has to be some way to build a receiver similar to whatever the police use to detect the GPS data, attach it to a small wand or golf club or something, and wave it around our car every time we get in it to make sure the trackers are not installed. So, GPS nerds out there, how's about we start putting together a How-To to homebrew a GPS tracker detector? Then, if we find a tracker attached to our vehicle, we can simply pull it off and duct tape it to the local stray cat.
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You could very easily argue that installing gear without your knowledge to your car while in your driveway would be considered vandalism. I'm just uncertain why they can't get a warrant to do it. There seems to be a war on oversight for the last decade and realistically even longer. When it become bad to have to justify your actions? In the case of FISA you don't even have to justify it before you do it.
No, no, if you're going to put GPS trackers on officials' vehicles, you don't want to just publish the coordinates of everywhere they go. That would very quickly lead to the discovery and removal of said device.
Wait till they go somewhere questionable, then "coincidentally" show up with a camera and publish pics instead. The tracker will survive longer, and the evidence will be much harder to refute. :)
Cops are lazy.
They put the speed traps in high-revenue spots over and over again. There's a pattern. There are GPS units that list all the known speed traps and warn you as you approach. There's no radar to jam, no lasers to thwart, just the position of known speed traps.
Er, sorry, what I meant to say was that since the police would only enforce the speed limits in areas that are particularly dangerous to speed in, it warns you to slow down as you approach a hazardous area.
Also, the GPS tracker would have to chirp to send out your data. It would probably be of VHF since that's unregulated (148 - 152 MHz is a good one) so all you'd have to do is check for broadcasts of that frequency. GPS refreshes at 1Hz, so that's probably what they would chirp at unless they're using burst downloads.
FYI, the range on GPS / VHF transmissions in urban environmentsis very short. It gets unreliable after a few hundred meters and it completely thwarted by brick.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
so if i have "no trespassing" "beware of pit-bull" and "trespassers will be shot" signs posted all over my 4-acre property, and a plain-clothes cop comes along to stick one of these things on my car at night, is it my fault if he gets unrecognizably mauled by three pit-bulls and/or shot from my porch?
Hell, you dont even need suspicion...
Everyone is automatically assumed guilty. This is a direct violation of the principles of America.
The law is engineered to get you... no matter WHAT the truth is. Prosecution want you in jail, no matter what. They do not care if you're innocent. They just want to win, and be right in their own mind.... despite truth.
Just look at how we argue politics today. We just scream points at each other. No one listens. Each side is out to win, and they dont want to hear truth. They want to WIN. THAT is how the law works...
They want a win.... not justice, truth, or to uphold the constitution.
That happened in NZ last year. The guy involved wound up in court arguing that the device belonged to him, as the Police had left it on his car. He won too.