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Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found On SUV
jcombel writes with this excerpt:
"As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently. The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car. Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man."
What does a citizen have to do to get this kind of personalized attention from the government? Most of the time they just ignore you unless it's time for them to steal money from your wallet.
A serious question, one that I hope folks take seriously because I truly cannot answer this:
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
I struggle for an answer myself. It feels wrong, but as far as I can tell that isn't a valid legal argument.
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Americans fear their government more now than at any time in history. Kind of funny if your from foreignland.
What sort of thing? Cops driving around? What part of those two paragraphs is supposed to be so sinister?
If you find a device like this on your car, have fun with it. Ship it across country - the government will know where the UPS guy is. Smash it open to see what is inside. Sell it on eBay. Report it to your local Sheriff as a suspicious device.
Seriously though...
Having cops follow you around to make their presence known is one hell of a way to use a covert surveillance device. The story isn't quite adding up.
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If you don't get that the point of this was to intimidate the reporter and discourage him from pursuing the story, you're either incredibly naive or you're being deliberately dense.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
1) Find a place where trains pass somewhat slowly
2) Wait for slow moving train
3) Stick tracker on outside of train car
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The question here isn't whether the police ought to investigate criminal behavior, but whether they can use these tactics without a warrant. Big difference. If this guy really is so damn shady, they should have no trouble at all getting a warrant. If there's not even enough suspicion to get a warrant, he certainly deserves to be left alone.
I think you are mistaken. The only thing that police could accomplish by intentionally trying to intimidate a reporter without being explicit enough to threaten him is to make the story that much jucier. Do you really believe that the officer brought a gas can and someone in civilian clothes along to go intimidate a reporter? He was likely giving someone who had run out of gas a ride and the reporter chose to interperet the encounter as some sort of nebulous conspiracy to get some publicity for the story.
Would it be ok if a cop hid in the boot of your car without a warrant instead?
Are there any scanning devices to scan your car to see if you have one of these hidden somewhere?
I'm sure you can do a thorough search from time to time- but if I want to know if I have one- is there a device I can buy to scan my car that isn't expensive?
I suspect all the bad guys who are really trying to hide will just run GPS blockers on their cars.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by the police, do police therefore have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by citizens? Sounds like a great argument. Think I'll run out, buy a bunch of these trackers, and stick them to the undercarriages of cop cars and then set up a web site that reports the position of every cop car in the city at all times in case you, um, need to call the cops.
Either that must be the case, or cops must get a warrant to do this.
If neither is the case, then the only option left to Americans is to fire every single person in every level of government with extreme prejudice, convene a constitutional convention, and start all over again from scratch.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
So I agree that warrantless tracking is a bad thing. Let's get that out of the way right at the beginning.
What baffles me in this case is that they COULD HAVE GOTTEN A WARRANT!
Look. The guy's cousin is on the run for drug charges, possibly involving drug smuggling. Before taking off, he sells his car to this guy, who waits a month or two, then drives to Mexico, stays a few days, and then drives back. I'm not saying any of that is damning, but it would certainly raise questions in my mind if I were the local DEA or police representative. And assuming they had any evidence at all on the guy who fled the country, that ought to be enough to get a warrant to do some minimally invasive tracking. (Yes, it's invasive. But there isn't a person staring through his window all night, there's not an actual person following him around all the time, and so on.)
So why not go ask for a warrant? For that matter, why not ask for a warrant to do more checking on this guy and his cousin? THAT'S what bothers me about the whole thing. They had no particular reason to be underhanded about any of it, but they chose to anyway.