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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. . .
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
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
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.
Oh, wait a sec...........
Never mind.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
The second you try to make this a partisan issue is the second you've proven you're drank the kool-aid. Both sides pander to those who give them money, which is everyone with profits on the line who also has enough money to "buy" someone.
Democrat or Republican, same shit, different piles.
Well... there are slight differences, but the end result still tastes crappy.
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.
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