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College Student Finds GPS On Car, FBI Retrieves It
mngdih writes with this excerpt from Wired:
"A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do. It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back ... His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals saying it's legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect's car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway. ... 'We have all the information we needed,' they told him. 'You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring.'"
Freedom is just a state granted regulated monopoly on your own free will.
someone want to comment on the effectiveness of GPS jammers?
Most likely prohibited by the FCC.
Your TomTom is a GPS receiver not a GPS tracker.
A GPS receiver knows where the GPS receiver is but doesn't have a mechanism to send that information to a remote location.
It doesn't do the FBI any good.
A GPS tracker contains a GPS receiver but also some communication method (cellular, sat, other wireless technology) to periodically or continually send location information to a remote location.
Recall the recent "found" iPhone 4 debacle:
The finder of a thing usually seems to have to make a reasonable attempt at finding the owner of an item (and "reasonable" varies quite a lot from place to place), and if it is unclaimed after 30 days, then they are entitled to keep it.
Generally speaking, YMMV, IANAL, so on, so forth.
But since the FBI asked for their widget back within 30 days, I guess that it's theirs to recover.
(Whether or not I think this is morally right is a different discussion entirely. Personally, I'd like to think that if I find a tracking widget on my car, that it's henceforth mine. However...)
Kid-proof tablet..
If you look further in the article, you can reconstruct a hypothetical scenario which, from the FBI's point of view, looks completely normal:
It's of course a bit scary to have people tracking you when you didn't do anything wrong; and it sounds like there was some annoying bullying (TFA: "[The FBI agent] told Afifi, “We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.”) But it sounds like there's an explanation of how this could have happened by-the-book, and the FBI is doing their job.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
A large radio station had a badly-tuned transmitter that jammed the lower half of the FM band in a major city for years, affecting radio reception in the (poor) quarter of the city badly, and making those low-power personal FM transmitters (for use with ipods) useless within 30 miles.
The residents of that neighborhood heard (shitty) gospel music over their land lines, the signal leakage was so bad.
It took the FCC repeated complaints and 10 years to do anything.
My guess is they likely go in from underneath, not through the hood. It's quicker, doesn't involve having to open the door, actually go inside the car (where someone is much more likely to notice that something has been tampered with), etc.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The TomTom "Live" devices have a sim card & can connect to the cellular network....so it really depends on the model! It can also be used to track your Friends if you purchase the "Live services"
All laws about this aren't the same. There are three different kinds of laws on this topic.
There's the 'forgot to pick up' law, where you accidentally put something somewhere and forget to get it, like setting your wallet down in a checkout line.
And there's the 'dropped' law, where you did not know it left your possession.
These are, believe it or not, often covered under different state laws.
For example, the rule with the first is often if you find something you think someone has accidentally left, you should keep it there, at least for some specified time. If a customer walks out of a restaurant without their purse, the restaurant should hold their purse for them.
Whereas with the second, if you find a wallet in the middle of the sidewalk, or even if you find one in the middle of the hall in the exact same restaurant, you're supposed to turn it in to the police. 'The Place' gets things left behind, where people can go back and get them, the police get things that just fell there, where people possibly have no idea where they are.
Generally. Of course, laws vary by state, but I thought it would be worth mentioning that even truly 'lost' items get treated differently depending on how they got lost.
And neither of those cover deliberately leaving something somewhere on someone else's property. If such a law exists, it's a different law. As far as I know, you don't have any obligation to take care of people's property and make sure they can find their stuff when they do that, like you do when they accidentally give you possession. OTOH, you can't deliberately break their stuff either.
I still think the best bet is to take the thing apart and claim you thought it was part of the car. (Or, rather, plead the fifth and have your lawyer point out they haven't proven you knew it wasn't part of the car.)
OTOH, if you really wanted to screw with the 'lost property' stuff, you put your car inside a giant metal box and hide it in a warehouse somewhere. You have not damaged their tracker at all.
And by them attaching the tracker, they've just admitted that they're recording the location of your car. So there's no way in hell they can force you to reveal the location of your car, because, duh, that's testifying against yourself. (Think about it for a second. If the FBI is collecting 'the location of the car', then 'the location of the car' is clearly being used as evidence in an investigation, presumably against you, so if you're forced to tell them 'the location of the car'...)
Now, a court could demand you turn it over, or be in contempt, but they're actually have to go through the court to do that. And you're still have a pretty interesting argument, namely, that you're not willing to remove something they attached to your car, as you have no experience in that sort of thing and they've threatened to sue you if you damage it .(And you still can't be forced to tell them where the car is.) So, while you'd like for them to get their tracker back, there appears to be no way to actually accomplish that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You would hope that they would charge you for it, meaning they will just put an entry into the US Treasury to withhold your next 10 tax returns until the unit is paid for. Otherwise they can simply put you on the "No Fly List" ..that is what they mean by "making it difficult for you". They will simply label you a terrorist or send your name to ICE..the world is their oyster, and you are nothing but a pawn.
As a (former) cop, I've watched other cops label innocent people as "Scumbags" and their life was hell in this jurisdiction from then on. A cop just has to "say" you did something to cause you irreparable grief. He doesn't have to prove anything until you go to court. I could only imagine an FBI agent and what his ego could do. Anybody in law enforcement, at every level, is an infantile egomaniac.
Uh, do that, go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Why would you go to jail? First off, you're returning government property. It could be argued that doing anything else would get you put in jail. Second, who said to put your name and return address on it?
WTF are you talking about?
1. GP was quoting from the Declaration of Independence, not the Bill of Rights.
2. The Bill of Rights are the first 10 *AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION*. By definition, they are part of it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
As a colony America did not have representation in Parliament. They tried to get representation before the war, but Britain wouldn't give in to one of their colonies.
Believe it or not, political means were tried before military means.
Step 1 : remove it and right away give it to your lawyer. There is one thing that pisses off FBI guys because they cant do crap to you... give their gear to a lawyer.
In the USA, if you dont instantly take steps to protect yourself you will be screwed by the cops. Innocent or not, it does not matter to the police.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No they don't, they get more decisions overturned because the 9th is really big. It isn't really out of line from other circuits.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Redditors are guessing that it had to do with this post that he made. So slightly more than race, but not by much.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
You're kidding, right? Look at this:
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Yes, I know that. An accusation isn't the same as a fact. Do you understand that? Or do you still think the wikileaks creator actually is a pedophile?
The fact is, if you know what the proposed law said, you know the accusation is false. The new law applied ONLY after two conditions were met: 1) contact made for some other valid, CRIMINAL reason. I.e., not just "cop saw you walking down the street", or "you asked a cop for the time". 2) A reasonable suspicion that the person was in the country illegally. I.e., not just "has an accent", or "has a certain coloration." "Profiling" meets neither of those conditions.
Additionally, the law was simply enforcement of the existing federal law, so if the AZ law was truly "profiling", then the federal law is, as well.
Maybe you need to come out from under your desk once in a while.