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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."
Damn Republicans passing laws and continuing abuses like this stripping away our rights. . .
you don't really need to bother. http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/05/04/1430233/Security-Specialist-Pwns-Police-Cruiser
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.
This is the answer if you get tagged with a device like this. at night in a obscured location, remove it and install it on someone else car. Preferably a car that is the same color and make.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No need to do that, just watch the video feed from the cop cars instead. Although I suspect in the USA, either could probably get you a jail term.
Oh no... it's the future.
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
That would involve data from his mobile carrier, which would involve the hassle of going to court and getting a warrant. You know, that whole pesky "due process of law" thing that they used to use for suspected criminals. Much easier to just slap this on someone's car, gather data, and *then* get a warrant. Or use the information for more sinister means. Or whatever you want, really. That's the beauty of warrantless police activities. It's limitless and they're accountable to nobody.
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.
If I found one of these attached to my car I think I'd simply throw it in a box and mail it somewhere. Perhaps to an FBI office on the other side of the country. Let the FBI blindly trace the path it takes through the USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.
Either that or I'd let a dog run around the neighborhood with it.
Bomb squad will just come out, evacuate the neighborhood, and blow up your car
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
They said that if I voted Republican, we'd get warrantless wiretapping. I voted Republican, and what do you know, we did!
It's hardly even a joke any more. Obama's just as bad as his opponents, except we also get Obamacare added on top.
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.
Too bad for you when you run into a judge who has never heard about your "rule" and decides to throw you in jail for tampering/destroying government property, interfering with an investigation, or whatever else they feel will stick. See your rules don't matter. The only rules that matter are the ones enforced by the government (or the mob).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Oh, wait a sec...........
Never mind.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I'd probably build an EMP generator over the weekend with the kids. "Hey kids, you want to know why your dad's not allowed near the microwave or the toaster?"
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
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.
The mechanics weren't looking very hard. IAAM (I Am A Mechanic).
Of course the quick way to find trackers would be to use a freq counter with an antenna and scan you car with the car battery disconnected to eliminate any interference from powered automotive circuits.
Time for a cheap open source RF sniffer?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
These trackers can probably operate passively. Simply sitting there, collecting location information until an agent with the proper equipment activates it and dumps the data.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
How long until the FBI starts selling this info? Hell, it works for Google.
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.
OK, so it was a 2011 Bentley. But I was tired of it. So I took it down to the local car recycler and they put the whole car into the crusher. Sorry About that GPS box you folks stuck on it.
Have gnu, will travel.
You are assuming that the FBI would admit to having data that exonerated you and would be willing to turn it over. I find it more likely that they would deny it existed for as long as possible and then slap "State Secrets" on it so you can't have it anyway.
The prosecution must reveal all evidence to the defence as in all the location logs for the tracker. It happens all the time. One of the best ways to get a charge dropped is to find evidence that the prosecution knew about but did not reveal. It does not have to be important evidence as hiding any evidence is grounds for dismissal. I realize it may be a difficult task but showing that some of the location logs are missing should be pretty easy. At worst all location logs would be thrown out.
Soooo... go with dogshit?
which is totally what she said
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
But, really, I think if you leave something with acid in it to be "discovered" by these guys you will have likely entered into territory you might live to regret.
Although the name contains "acid", butyric acid isn't a dangerous corrosive acid. It just smells really bad.
just get the FBI to provide proof of ownership.. you know a receipt or something :).
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Oh get real! What would happen is "ooops, lost the logs, what a fucking shame" like how the prosecution deleted the victims phone in the above case and how the judge refused to allow an expert to testify that the guy's computer was hacked.
Lets be honest folks, if they want to fuck you they aren't gonna let a silly thing like evidence get in the way. Hell there is a guy on death row in Texas right now where the DNA shows he didn't do it so the prosecutor just said "Well he didn't rape her, he must have just came along and killed her". Why? Just because it was Tuesday?
Anyone who has paid attention to our courts can come up with plenty of cases that are so full of shit you don't see how the prosecutor doesn't break into a shit eating grin from the level of bullshit they try to pass over on the jury. I remember one from my home state where pretty much everyone knew a cop had taken this guy out, most likely because he had caught the cops doing a dope deal, so they simply got the medical examiner to say that he committed suicide. Yeah by beating the shit out of himself, shooting himself three or four times, and THEN throwing himself off a bridge just to make sure. Same as how the prosecutor refused to listen to the engineer that testified that the two teens he ran over on the track were covered in a police tarp at the time and instead got the medical examiner to rule that the kids must have been so stoned on pot they just happened to fall asleep on the track and not get woke up by that train bouncing the living hell out of the tracks, or the ear splitting whistle. Uh huh.
The only way you are gonna get a truly fair trial in this country is if you got the $$$ to hire you a land shark to fight for you, otherwise you're fucked. That is of course if you actually make it to trial, because they can easily decide you are 'resisting arrest" and hit you with that "less lethal" taser...ohh about a dozen times or so. I guess twitching can legally be considered a form of resisting?
Look up "the largest gang in America" on YouTube and tell me how many rights you actually have now, because from what I saw the only real 'right" you have is to get the living shit beat out of you if you look at a cop funny, followed by being charged for making his knuckles sore pounding your ass. And if the local yokels can get away with that much, just imagine how much more a fed can get away with, such as TFA or worse.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are you part of a group that it doesn't like? Even if there's no evidence whatsoever that anyone in that group has ever committed a serious crime? Then they can and will follow you around for years with one of these.
To be fair, this is hardly new for the FBI. Remember COINTELPRO? You know, the FBI program after such dangerous and violent people as Martin Luther King and John Lennon. And there's some evidence that they continue to infiltrate and try to control numerous protest movements to ensure that their ideas are easily discredited.
I am officially gone from
For example, they probably live behind electric gates and would charge the planter with criminal trespass.
I'm sure they have to stop at red lights eventually. (Or the grocery store, or any old place.)
Heck, except for the magnets, it's probably fairly inexpensive to build mock trackers and just start spamming them around rich neighborhoods. Let the local cops explain that one away...
You don't have to go to a foreign country to hear police officers saying those sorts of things. I have heard law enforcement officials at various levels of government here in the United States complaining about people knowing and exercising their rights, and demanding more power to undermine and counter those rights.
Palm trees and 8
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
It's unlikely they can run the GPS receiver without leaking the local oscillator frequency. So a frequency counter should be able to find it.
If I found one of these on my car, I'd consider it my patriotic duty to place it on a vehicle I spend more time on. Namely, the train I ride to work.
If there is no reason to search me why do it?
If there is no reason to track me then why do it?
If I am a suspect, then please feel free to get a warrant. Otherwise fuck off.
Your comment was the worst I read today.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
How do I determine if I have one of these things on my car?
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.