After US v. Jones, FBI Turns Off 3,000 GPS Tracking Devices

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the Wall Street Journal: "The Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a 'sea change' inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann. Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called 'Big Brother in the 21st Century' on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use. These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law. After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them."

Comments

Re:So how are they powered?

[schnikies79]

They are not that small. The battery pack is about a foot long.

http://gizmodo.com/5658661/fbi-gets-caught-tracking-mans-car-wants-its-gps-device-back

Re:Turn it on again?

[sudden.zero]

GPS tracking devices are radio controlled. The device still has power when it is "off" only the Global Positioning transmitter is off and it can be turned back on at any point by sending a command to the device. In layman's terms it is kind of like a cellular "phone" which is technically a radio. Even when your ringer is off you can still receive calls you just can't hear them in which case they go to voice mail (by default), or any other number/service you have decided to reprogram the device to send to.

For the full decision from the Supreme Court

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/scotusjones.pdf

Re:For the full decision from the Supreme Court

[magarity]

For all the partisans out there, note this was a unanimous decision.

Re:So how are they powered?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

they burn a teeeeny tiny amount of electricity in standby - think like a a wrist watch - it can use a tiny battery for years. They only start burning juice when their accelerometer kicks in when the car moves. It then asks where it is (GPS co-ordinates) phones those in and then every (x) seconds repeats that -
Box to GPS: "Where Am I?"
GPS to Box:(X.Y.)
Box: [send X.Y. to bigbrother@fbi.gov]
In between, it's "on" but only needs to transmit every (x) seconds, and even then, not for very long. Transmitting is the big energy burner. The really good ones can last over a month assuming the car is used about an hour every day. They go back to "sleep" mode after about 5 minutes of motionlessness.
You can buy them yourself. The good one cost about $200 - 300 and you have to pay for access to the data to be sent to you and/or access to the mashup where the data is plotted on Google maps. Don't ask why I know about this stuff...