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Battle Brews Over FBI's Warrantless GPS Tracking
fysdt writes "The FBI's use of GPS vehicle tracking devices is becoming a contentious privacy issue in the courts, with the Obama administration seeking Supreme Court approval for its use of the devices without a warrant, and a federal civil rights lawsuit targeting the Justice Department for tracking the movements of an Arab-American student. In the midst of this legal controversy, Threat Level decided to take a look at the inside of one of the devices, with the help of the teardown artists at iFixit."
Violation of privacy is something committed by a party of equal power to yourself. When government commits injustice, the correct term is oppression. We aren't talking about a nosey neighbor peeking out the window at you, or even a dedicated stalker. We are talking about the organization holding the special right to employ coercion against you as their means -- the most dangerous force that could possibly exist. Needless to say, the situation is completely, utterly different.
Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, we are left...defending our rights from exactly the same threat we faced before. Glad that killing the guy accomplished so much.
Palm trees and 8
So would it be ok to place a GPS tracker on every police car you find, I bet not and while betting I bet that if you were caught trying to put such a thing on a police car you would get shot.
My advise on this is quite simple, if you find a little black box, an antenna and a battery pack on the underside of your car, call the local police and tell them you found exactly what you found under your car, a bundle with wires coming out of it (the battery pack) a black box attached to it (the GPS receiver) and an antenna and your afraid to touch it. Make certain your insurance is paid up.
Call the local news as well, its a bomb threat for certain but this is an economics game, they can't afford to follow everyone with agents so its cheaper to track everyone of interest and sort it out later, make this cost them as much as possible, PR spin isn't cheap, nor is replacing GPS devices that keep 'falling' off the car (rip the wires, leave parts of it on the car) at some point it becomes cheaper to either follow you with Agents, or stop following you.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
On the off chance that you weren't being sarcastic: warrants are handed out pretty freely to law enforcement when they can show any semblance of a reason to suspect someone. If it's an emergency, they can be issued retroactively. If the FBI claims the need to track without a warrant, the logical conclusion to draw is that they are tracking at least some people without good reason - if they had good reason, they could get a warrant, after all.
It's limitless and they're accountable to nobody.
No, they are always accountable to the people. Except it takes something like Egypt or Libya to get rid of them once they gain so much power. But eventually the people always wake up and shake off the yoke when it bothers them too much. It's a repeated lesson throughout human history
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Damn Republicans passing laws and continuing abuses like this stripping away our rights. . .
Yeh, no crap. The difference is, if it WAS a Republican, the media and the left wing would be up in arms...
Now, all we hear are the echos of silences.
pesky "due process of law" thing
I was in Pune, India about ten years ago when one police precinct in the city got assigned a new chief inspector. It was the Deccan area, where there's a huge number of colleges and universities.
The newspaper had an interview with the new chief inspector (it was a big deal because she was the first woman in the position) and one of the questions they asked her was what factors complicated policing that precinct. Her answer was "there's a lot of educated people who know their rights."
First: who knows? Even if you're not cynical about government convicting or even prosecuting innocent people all the time, surely you admit they investigate innocent people all the time. They have to in order to do their job, rule out suspects, etc. This is why the we try to limit them taking extra more-invasive steps against people to only when they can show they have a good reason. If they only looked at people who are doing things that really warrant their attention, we would assume them to have godlike infallibility and wouldn't even bother with a justice system at all; just have them pass sentence on the bad guys.
But aside from that...
If it is legal for law enforcement to do this without a warrant, that suggests that legally the activity of putting a bug on someone else's care isn't special; i.e. it is not something that is considered to be a violation of privacy for which we sometimes permit government to do it as part of their rightful monopoly on force. In other words, if government can do this without invoking its special government-y powers, then anyone should be legally allowed to do it.
So your question becomes:
Might the neighborhood burglar like realtime updated reports on when you're home and when you're not? Might your insurance carrier want to know if your daily patterns are outside the median? Might your stalker want to know where you are? Might your ex-wife's private investigator want to know who you're visiting? Might ClearChannel want to know which billboards you drive by most often? And so on. Draw on your paranoia and imagination and I think you'll see that Big Brother is just one of many brothers to be concerned about.
If Just Anyone is not allowed to bug your car, then that suggests it is a special power reserved for government, and you're going to have a hard time arguing it's not a violation of privacy (if it's not, then why can't I bug your car?) or that it doesn't require any sort of balances or limits of power for which the 4th amendment was intended to provide protection.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
and what are you doing that you do not want law enforcement to know?
Well, drove my car to work on the usually route, parked it at work for the day, drove back home, went to my local petrol station. And all of that I don't want law enforcement to know, because it is none of their f***ing business.
Uh huh...BTW where the hell have you been for the past 80 years or so? The FBI have always been jack booted thugs going back to their very formation! look up COINTELPRO and see how they have gone so far as to execute Americans on American soil for daring to speak views that weren't on the FBI's approved list of things Negroes were allowed to say at the time.
Anybody that expects the FBI to be anything BUT jack booted attack dogs really haven't been paying attention, just as anybody that thought Nobama would be any different than McSame obviously hadn't been following the money. We lost this country decades ago the only difference now is the greedy swine at the top have gotten so ballsy they don't even pretend to give a fuck about things like the constitution anymore.
But as others have said sooner or later we'll have our very own Egypt and things will get real ugly. I'm betting when China dumps their dollars and starts a worldwide dollar dump and the US dollar is worth about as much as a buck in Zimbabwe the excrement WILL hit the bladed cooling device. My guess is a lot of rich folks will be doing their impersonation of the fall of Saigon complete with helicopters taking off of roofs to escape the hordes. The real question will be what comes after which I kinda feel sorry for the rest of the planet then because as we saw in Europe a militant nation with massive unemployment and a shitload of weapons tends to get nasty to those around them. Hell we even have the pre-made groups to persecute, just replace Jews and Gypsy with Mexicans and H1-Bs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We've always been at war with Eastasia
No, they would find some other charge to make against whoever did the planting and tracking. For example, they probably live behind electric gates and would charge the planter with criminal trespass. What they might charge the tracker with can be left to the imagination... not mine -- I can't think of anything, but potentially anything from "conspiracy" to "terrorism" is quite likely. (Government is immune to charges of terrorism, but if you act in any way against government, guess what you are?)
Scared of what will happen if you resist the governments attempts to track you? Does this sound healthy to you?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
At forty, I'm not exactly young anymore, and I *do* have a family. Nevertheless, I am still very much an idealist, who believes that cause and principle are very, very important. To some degree, cause and principle are so important to me *because* I have a family. I don't want my daughter to grow up living in a tyrannical police state, and consequently, I work to create change. Wasn't it John Adams who said, "I study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy and that their children may study painting, poetry and music."?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
what are you doing that you do not want law enforcement to know?
Living my life. I do not want law enforcement agencies knowing what I do over the course of a day. Who knows what sort of surprise laws, bizarre readings of the law, or overzealous cops and prosecutors one can wind up facing? Better safe than sorry; the point of the 4th amendment, like the rest of the bill of rights, is to protect us from tyranny, and we need that sort of protection these days.
Palm trees and 8
Thats so cute... you actually trust them.
The device malfunctioned.
The logs were lost.
The logs get tampered with.
Etc.
They cant loose a case, it doesn't matter if the wrong person gets put away as long as the win to loss ratio is high enough to make that run for governor.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.