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Senator Introduces Bill To Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking
bs0d3 writes "Right now the police and FBI are able to use GPS tracking devices, stingrays, and other tracking technologies without a warrant. They can read your personal emails without a warrant, they can recall your phone call history, all without a warrant. These are clear violations of the fourth amendment, but time and time again the courts are ruling that the fourth amendment doesn't protect people who use modern technology. This week Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Kirk (R-IL), and Jason Chaffetz (D-UT) announced a bill with bipartisan support called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act. It provides sorely needed legal clarity for the use of electronically-obtained location data that can be used to track and log the location and movements of individual Americans. The G.P.S. Act is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Constitution Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The full text of the bill can be read online."
Seems like every time something good happens for people's rights, Ron Wyden is always there getting it started. Can't we just clone him and replace the entire senate?
No one has posted yet. Can it be everyone is too busy reading TFA?
but time and time again the courts are ruling that the fourth amendment doesn't protect people who use modern technology.
If that is a fact then the "right to bear arms" doesn't apply to modern weapons either.
That's just not the Stingray that I used to know :(
Does "bipartisan support" mean that it has the support of both the major parties, or simply that it has the support of a couple of guys in each but will get voted down by a majority in both?
Jason is not a D-UT he is a R-UT. Please fix the post and do a little fact checking next time...
Since at least 1990. Summary is incorrect.
NT
They should have just named this bill "The Privacy and Surveillance Act". What about license plate readers and street cameras and other types of big brother surveillance?
Legal and actual practice are two different worlds however. In short only rich people have privacy. The harsh reality in technology and privacy is that it's extremely difficult for anyone to actually prove anything and enforce one's rights. The law may say this and that is not legal, but the tools just make it easy to implement and impossible to trace. True privacy, not just on paper, is more and more becoming, in practice, a luxury few have money to buy and pay for. It takes a few lawyers and techs. Expensive ones. It's not only the police and FBI that have an interest in finding out who, where, and what happens in everyone's lives, mostly it's the marketing and sales for every single company everywhere. And you can bet they have the money and resources to find out whatever they need to about you - legal or not - all in an anonymized, "non personally identifiable" way.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Nothing else to say.
It's great that the bill was introduced to Congress. Now let's see it pass. I have my doubts of that happening between the "Law and Order" and "Stop the Terrorists at All Costs to Liberty" types of congressmen that seem to control Congress.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
Excellent bbq'd.
The face of Napoleon keeps changing, but the Seven Commandments, in the form of the Patriot Act, stay pretty much the same. One problem the current Napoleon is going to have is he is too effective at killing off his Snowballs. The trick is to keep them alive, at least in the populaces minds, so that there is always justification for disregarding the Fourth Amendment. I wish Ron Wyden luck in his fight, especially against Section 201 and 225 of Title II of the "Patriot Act", the low bar of pretty much doing what you want without warrant in the name of Terrorism, as set out by Section 201, is rendered almost completely moot by Section 225 where the FBI is immune from FISA oversight anyway.
Was this in the constitution? That is insane. Why not say the amendment expires depending on what side of the bed the supreme justice wakes up on. What a load of crap? Is there a website that tracks horrible decisions and the people involved? Where is shame in our society? This is embarrassing.
"These are clear violations of the fourth amendment..."
If that were true, I don't think that "time and again" the courts would be ruling otherwise, and "legal clarity" would not be required. It's an unsettled area of law.
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, complete and utter legal ignoramuses do not end up as high-level judges. Certainly some of them may produce rulings with which there is legitimate grounds for appeal (and rulings with which a majority of Slashdot posters disagree), but that does not make those decisions blatantly unjustified from the start.
Personally, I think it's borderline, and I don't know enough 4th-amdendment jurisprudence to make a definitive call.
They will just hire a bunch of agents to tail people they want to tail. Costing millions of dollars in vehicles, fuel, payroll and benefits.
Honestly who thinks of these things? Do congressfolks have an aide or something who's sole job is to come up with titles that also have convenient acronym? or is it a congressional committee?
Central Ohio Home Theater Installation - The Theater People
Firstly, the 4th amendment protects against "unreasonable" search and seizure without a warrant. "Reasonable" is open to interpretation.
The thinking goes like this... it's not illegal for somebody like a meter maid to walk up to your car, mark the tire, and walk away. This is one way a meter maid can "track" your car. They, via the chalk mark, must "modify" your tire to do so.
The police can currently track suspects on public roads without a warrant through the expensive, dangerous, and error-prone method of tailing a vehicle. A GPS tracker stuck to the wheelwell produces identical information at far less expense and risk. As long as the whereabouts of the vehicle are not tracked on private property, it produced the exact same data following the car would. Again, neither method requires a warrant. They have "modified" your vehicle no more than our prototypical meter maid.
The job of the courts is to draw the line to decide between the state's interest in the efficient operation of law enforcement and the citizen's interest in having his property untouched by the state. (Your location on public roads is already public data not subject to protection of any kind... it's the collecting of that data that's the sticking point; can they touch your property without a warrant to do so?)
they're pretty good. Great acronym, and the title isn't some convoluted mess concocted to create such an acronym.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You could read a version of the bill that isn't formatted like it's perl:
Here
BTW, this looks to have been introduced in the House back on June 14. The corresponding Senate bill (the subject of this story) was introduced on June 15 and has been languishing in the Judiciary Committee since then.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
"It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for a person to intercept geolocation information pertaining to another person if such other person has given prior consent to such interception unless such information is intercepted for the purpose of committing any criminal or tortuous act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any State."
That is listed under exemptions (along with intercepting for foreign intel, emergency, and device theft). Wouldn't the easy way around this be to force us to consent to tracking via the TOS with the cell phone carrier? (If we haven't already done so). Kinda the same way I consent to a preliminary breath test implicitely by having a drivers license, or forfeit my license upon refusal. I feel like this bill, if passed, will just immediately be loop-holed by a "In order to use a cell phone, you agree to be tracked" clause.
senate house
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Nice to see Mark Kirk do something because commit treason and lie about his military record.
But if they Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking - I think that they'll just use somthing else. http://www.alycesshoppingmall.com/
TERRORISTS!!!
EVIL Terrorists!!!
Evil Terrorists are going to get your children!!!
Won't SOMEBODY Think Of The Children(tm)?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Firstly, the position of your vehicle on public roads is not now, and never has been, subject to constitutional protections. Those public roads are public property, and any member of the public, or the state itself, can record data about what vehicles are traveling which roads when. (Just like you can collect data on public airspace usage... there are exhaustive databases that have years of flight tracking for every plane in the US that flew under a flight plan.) That data can be bought, sold, transferred, analyzed, reported on, used in lawsuits or criminal cases, etc. with no restrictions of any kind. This part of the law isn't the least bit vague. A little creepy, yes, but not legally questionable. The only legal questions are on the collection methods, not the data itself.
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous? Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act... an officer can frisk you and your clothing (property) without a warrant during an arrest, but he can't toss your car (another form of property.)
An officer can, under current constitutional law, place a chalk mark on your tire to track how long it has been parked by the roadside. What are the legally significant distinctions between that and a GPS tracker in your tire well? Is that distinction enough to make the device "unreasonable"? There certainly are distinctions between the two, but where is the line of "reasonable" search without a warrant crossed?
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient? The two standards to choose from would be Reasonable Suspicion (no warrant needed) vs. Probable Cause (intrusive enough to make a warrant necessary.)
This is not contorted logic here... it's a legitimate legal question where different judges have interpreted the relevant precedent differently. And it's not one I know the answer to.
One way to solve this that seems logical to me is if they can use gps tracking on me without a warrant then I should be able to do the same to them. I'm pretty sure I can't put tracking devices on cop cars so they shouldn't be allowed to do that to my car. The same rule applies to UAVs, alternate imaging techniques, and other new technologies. It is hard to keep laws up to date with the pace of technology so having a guiding principle like allowing law enforcement/government to do no more without a warrant than civilians can seems like a fair solution. I know there needs to be a few exceptions like detaining a person, but those few exceptions won't change with technology.
Hobby Robotics
This is a great piece of legislation but if it makes it through Congress, it seems to me like it would have a serious chance of a veto. Obama has a horrid record on civil liberties.
Ron Wyden isn't the only Congressman who has at least the consistent appearance of motives to champion the Common Good; there are others. Another two that most readily come to mind are Kucinich of Ohio and McDermott of Washington (State).
These three at least need to be held up as examples of what result we should get from electing people to "lead" us. Too many of the bastards quickly forget that WE HIRED THEM.
... but if it were passed, who can know what other unrelated stuff would get tacked on to it by then?
Sorry, the first sentence of the third paragraph should read "...January of 1981", not "1980".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sounds like someone forgot to pay a Senator off.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
... the opposite of whether Obama supports it.
If Obama supports something, the Republicans will auto-hate it even if it originated with Republicans.
So if Obama supports this bill, the Republicans will vote against it. If he opposes it, the bill will be on his desk for signing next week.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
It took me quite a while to find it (thanks to our lovely thomas.loc.gov site), but I did finally track down that it was S.1212 and H.R. 2168, both introduced back in June. It was introduced by Wyden and co-sponsored by Kirk in the Senate and introduced by Chaffetz in the House.
You can read all about it here: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.112s1212
What about the children? How can be protect them!
... and why did he wait this long to do something about it!
Whatever your views on this bill, send an email to your Senator. Don't be part of the silence.
That bill will be there until republicans admin their party is a giant failure. Or longer.
Who is paying (er, making campaign contributions) for this?