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Careful What You Post, the FBI Has More of These
jamie writes "A comment posted to a website got its author's *friend's* car an unwanted aftermarket addon. The Orion Guardian ST820, a GPS tracking device, was attached to the underside of the car by the FBI. No warrant required. The bugged friend, a college student studying marketing, was apparently under suspicion because he's half-Egyptian. As Bruce Schneier says, 'If they're doing this to someone so tangentially connected to a vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog, just how many of us have tracking devices on our cars right now ...' The ACLU is investigating." This follows up on our earlier mention of the same student, who turned the tracking device over to the FBI.
and get it to the supreme court. if they say this is legal, burn it down. simple really.
Post to this thread, and be the first person on your block to receive a free GPS tracking device! (The device will be mounted under your car, hidden. Peel slowly, and see!)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Don't you hate pants?
--alop
Just because I criticize the US government's homeland policies doesn't mean... hey, what's this big red blinking thing on the underside of my laptop?
4chan / Anon should start a campaign called "operation fearstorm" in which local crimestoppers and FBI tip lines are flooded with anonymous terrorism and pedophile suspicions of random citizens, or perhaps the families of law enforcement, local politicians, and the clergy.
Mainstream media coverage of the fiasco will show just how stupid and bust-desperate the Feds are. And, of course, the most dangerous are the informants and provocateurs working for the feds. They should be rounded up and beaten brutally.
.. and most of my friends do not care about this. It's part of the religion to care less about possible adversities as a result of your good action.
Albanian emigrant - one of those that were trapped by FBI via Egyptian scumbag into the army base plot - famously said to that informant at some point (pre-arrest, of course): "I do not care if you work for FBI, I will do what I have to do". (something to that avail).
That's the attitude unbelievers should learn from Muslims: if you stand for something right, do not be afraid of adversary consequences.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Anyone else tempted to try and drive a route that spells "I know you're watching" when seen on a map?
Well, this article doesn't "follow up" on jack. It's just less informative and more inflammatory than the original.
He wasn't being tracked becasue of a blog post at all. His father was a notable political figure, and he travels and sends money to suspicious locations. From the article linked on the original slashdot story:
Alexa has Reddit at #239...Schneier at #36148. Just for the record.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
One interesting thing from TFA is that newer GPS trackers are installed under the bonnet, and powered by the car battery. I can sort of see how one might say you can track cars without a warrant using magnetic, battery powered GPS trackers (like the one in the article), but how on earth can breaking into the car not require a warrant?
If the government has a warrant to track your vehicle with a GPS device, I'm fine with them tracking it.
Some caveats.
1) They should _not_ be allowed onto private property to install said devices. That's a slippery slope. If your property is not private, then what is? If I'm on my driveway, apparently it's fair game "because the UPS driver can walk on it". But what if you park in the yard because too many cars are in the driveway? What if you park around back? What if you park in a car port? What if it's in the garage but the door is open enough to get in? What if... No. Follow me and tag my car when it's in a public place, again, if you have a warrant to do so.
2) If I find a device on my car and I don't know you put it there. It's mine, period. Now, if you tell me its there and that's its government property and I'm legally obligated to leave it there, fine. I can rent a car (I guess that's why they don't tell you). But you can't expect me to just inherently know that the device isn't mine when I had no idea you put it there without my knowledge. For all I know it's a part of the car right out of the factory.
This BS with agents/contractors going onto private property installing devices and then threatening you when you find it... It has to stop.
Given that the 7th and 9th Circuits have OK'd warrantless tracking, I am unsure how quickly the Supreme Court would grant cert on this issue. And given the current members of the Court, I might not like their decision.
I read a series of the attached articles. A seperate instance upon which the apparent ruling that allows this particular abuse of power said: "On two occasions, agents sneaked into his driveway before dawn to affix the tracking devices to the undercarriage of his Jeep." Can't you at the very least say that this constitutes trespassing or illegal search? I'm shocked that this doesn't violate constitutionally granted freedoms (privacy, illegal search, etc.)
Here is one other advantage of using a motorcycle as your primary means of transportation. It's a lot harder to hide anything on a motorcycle than it is to hide something on a car.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Search your car for the tracking unit. Remove it and try and be creative by placing it on a taxi or other highly mobile vehicle. I do wonder how long it would take the spooks to figure out they were accumulating data on the wrong car.
... to use public transportation. Go green!
Ubuntu on primary work desktop since Dapper Drake (2006).
The link can be searched on Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000
Here is the text from when it was active as the best I can do:
The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.) It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich. This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside. After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.) In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy. The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.) Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night. Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."
I don't know how well this stands, but hey, it's something!
How much do the new ones weigh, and would the scales used to weigh trucks (many of which are available for weighing cars) detect the difference?
Too many variables. 1/2 gallon of gas either way would more than make up the difference.
I found one of those electronic thingeys in my car, with lots of wires plugged into it, so I ripped the sucker out. Then, according to my mechanic, someone stole my ECU, which cost me $300 to replace. And those damn FBI agents also snuck another one of those devices into my car. Talk about your bad luck. I'm off to get rid of this new one, so wish me luck.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
will car mechanics be gagged by the FBI from telling customers they found an odd box or two that don't belong?
BTW, this particular device is a few generations out of date; now the Great Protectors of Our Rights have much tinier Boxes of Freedom that are surreptitiously powered via the cars' battery cable.
I am currently seeking an IT position, and have over 35 years experience in Wintel servers, clients, and especially automated rollouts, OS, and application customization. Full resume upon request.
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Religious extremism is merely a tiny subset in the world of extremism. What all extremists have in common is that they employ an initiation of physical force (coercion, not persuasion) as a means to their end. Indeed, it isn't their ideology or motive that makes them evil; it is precisely the initiation of force (or threat thereof). It is the initiation of force itself that is extreme, and the acute observer will realize that the label "extremist" applies to anyone who resorts to coercion as a means to an end, including schoolyard bullies, thiefs, and (get ready for this) governments.
Many people are fond of claiming that money is the "root of all evil". On the contrary, it is coercion which is the root of all evil, because coercion is the one absolute prerequisite of all forms of injustice.
I'd bet that the FBI has no idea why the FBI bugged the man, except that some lazy SAC got a boxful and decided to put them on the car of anyone with brown skin or a middle-eastern name.
Remember, the burden of proof for why this tracking device was placed is always on the authorities who placed it. I really don't think you want a situation where someone has to explain why they should not have tracking devices on their car.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I normally don't respond to Anonymous Jackoffs, but do you know anything about the Muslim Community Association? They're the largest Muslim community group in the US and there has never been anything that shows they have any ties to any terrorist or extremist groups. The MCA are not fundamentalists, they're not extremists. Until you're ready to have surveillance on every person who listens to Glenn Beck, you need to re-think your notion that every Muslim in the US should have trackers placed on their cars.
You are welcome on my lawn.
How can the GPS work under a car? I'd think with all that metal on top, the GPS signal would be pretty attenuated.
Maybe if it was near the edge of the bottom of the car with an antenna that gets a sideview, even then I'm not sure it would see enough sats to get a fix.
The device shown has the FCC ID number "O9EQ2438F-M" on the outside of the box, as required by law. FCC ID numbers can be looked up in the FCC database, where details of the device and pictures of the electronics are available. It's a cell phone module, of course. The FCC was told it was for "stolen currency tracking". The maker was Wavecom, since acquired by Sierra Wireless. The unit dates from 2005.
That's just a standard RF module. That application covers the addition of a spread-spectrum module to upgrade the cell access to support PCS networks. The base device, according to the FCC application, is FCC ID NBI-MTAG216. This is more interesting. It's a "Trac Pak V", from "Spectrum Management LLC" of Carrolton, TX.
When the spread-spectrum module was added, the company issued a press release about it. "Spectrum Management, L.L.C., a global provider of innovative physical and electronic security products which include its proprietary asset tracking and management systems, announced today the completion of its TracPac CS Tag and the development of an all-new web-based tracking and location system. Spectrum has combined technologies with Wavecom, a leading provider of pre-packaged wireless communications solutions for automotive, industrial and mobile professional applications, with a wide range of fully integrated modules and modems. The new Tag design pairs Wavecom's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) module with GPSOne, and Spectrum's proprietary VHF homing technology to provide a wide range of Location Based Services (LBS). Spectrum Management expects to offer similar tracking and location services on Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications by simply substituting Wavecom's plug-in compatible GSM module."
Spectrum Management's predecessor company was ProNet, which was a public company in the 1990s. They were acquired by Metrocall, and the tracking business was split off as Electronic Tracking Systems. They started as a pager company, but branched out into tracking devices. From their SEC filing: "In 1988, the Company began to apply advanced wireless technology to the security business by marketing radio-activated electronic tracking systems to financial institutions. At December 31, 1996, the Company's security systems consisted of 29,501 miniature radio transmitters, or "TracPacs," in service." Most of these were leased to banks, and attached to items of value or hidden in bundles of currency. The 1990s model was a pre-GPS technology; they had to get local cops to install receivers (like LoJack does) for this to work. So it only worked in a few markets, and they were having trouble expanding, from their SEC filings. The newer technology doesn't have that limitation.
So it's a stock piece of law enforcement equipment, circa 2005.
Put me on your list and bug my car. I'd really like to play around with one of your GPS devices. Maybe i'll even get my 15 minutes of fame. BTW I'm 100percent sure i'm related to Osama Bin Laden through Adam and Eve.