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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."
Are you surprised that the number is high, or that the number is low?
Personally, what I'd love to know is whether the FBI was being lazy with those 3,000(if we can do it with or without a court order, why go to the judge?) or whether they had 3,000 active bugs for investigations so flimsy that they couldn't find a judge to sign...
The former wouldn't be good, but would be unsurprising and fairly banal. Doing paperwork when you don't have to is a fairly rare psychological disorder, after all. The latter, on the other hand, would be 'uncomfortably retro' behavior on the FBI's part, hearkening back to their historically loose adherence to petty matters of law and due process.