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."

Comments

Re:Sauce for the goose

[Beardo the Bearded]

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.