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GPS Tracking of State Worker Raises Privacy Issues
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a Times Union article: "How far can state government go in keeping tabs on its employees? That's the question a mid-level appeals court will consider in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the state Labor Department, in the case of a fired state worker who was tracked with a GPS device that investigators secretly attached to his personal car. ... State officials tracked Cunningham's whereabouts by secretly attaching a GPS device to his BMW. The electronic tailing went beyond what would normally be termed Cunningham's work hours, since the device was on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They even tracked him on a multi-day family vacation."
"Kate Nepveu, an assistant solicitor general, said the state realized the GPS tracking was intrusive, but Cunningham's pattern of misconduct and the difficulty of constant in-person surveillance justified the technique."
Yup, we knew that we had no business doing it; but he was a Bad Guy and doing our jobs is Hard. Cry, cry, pity me... Is there any sort of procedural abuse that one couldn't justify with exactly that line? Virtually everything we call "due process" is inconvenient for the prosecution, and I've never heard of somebody going after someone that they wouldn't at least say was guilty of misconduct...
Maybe a better solution would have been to provide him a state vehicle with a hidden GPS tracker. :P
Or an Obvious one, functional or not. That might have got him back into line if there was wrong doing, or show he wasn't worth keeping, either way it would have been far cheaper than a lawsuit even if they win it.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
That, and attaching a device to his personal car should be considered some kind of tresspassing/vandalism.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz