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.'"

Comments

Your TomTom is a GPS receiver not a GPS tracker.

[anUnhandledException]

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.

Friend "wrote something stupid"

[martyros]

If you look further in the article, you can reconstruct a hypothetical scenario which, from the FBI's point of view, looks completely normal:

• Young Arab American named Khaled writes a blog post hinting at something violent: (TFA: "When he later asked Khaled about the post, his friend recalled “writing something stupid,” but said he wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing.")
• FBI gets warrants to track whereabouts of Khalid and his friends, one of whom is Afifi (TFA: "[A former FBI agent] said he was certain that agents who installed it would have obtained a 30-day warrant for its use.")
• FBI plants device on Afifi's car.
• Afifi finds the device during a routine check-up
• FBI notices the thing isn't moving, and/or notice the photos online, and decide to show their cards; especially since they're convinced he's not important anyway.

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.

Re:Friend "wrote something stupid"

[SoTerrified]

Just for interests sake, here's the "something stupid" that his buddy Khaled wrote on a 'blog'.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_deodorant_could_be_a_bomb_why_are_you/c0sve5q

bombing a mall seems so easy to do. i mean all you really need is a bomb, a regular outfit so you arent the crazy guy in a trench coat trying to blow up a mall and a shopping bag. i mean if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already.. you can put a bag in a million different places, there would be no way to foresee the next target, and really no way to prevent it unless CTU gets some intel at the last minute in which case every city but LA is fucked...so...yea...now i'm surely bugged : /

If that post gets you FBI monitoring... The FBI has WAYYYY too much time on their hands. But one has to laugh at the irony of the "I'm surely bugged"...

Re:What happens if you destroy it?

[Geek_Cop]

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.

Re:What happens if you destroy it?

[JAZ]

Redditors are guessing that it had to do with this post that he made. So slightly more than race, but not by much.