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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."
I highly doubt is only 3000.
Maybe the feds should be more careful before giving out their toys!
Tell the FBI to write a nice letter to the owners of the vehicles asking if they would kindly return the black box attached under the right rear fender.
I don't. They most likely have many more as you can still plant/use them with a warrant. The 3000 were just for ones without warrants.
What would happen if I happened to find such a device on my car and put a fine metallic mesh grounded to the chassis of the vehicle? They would have a serious problem, I guess...
Ezekiel 23:20
My first reaction to this was "Why wouldn't they just let them die off when their batteries run down?" In my experience, no GPS device small enough to be hidden in a car will run more than a few days without recharging the battery; most of them die in a matter of hours.
Then my second thought was "How are those gadgets powered?" Do they have a a humongous battery that will last weeks or months? Do they tap into the car's electrical system and not need a battery? If so, will the owner of the car find that the battery is run down when they don't drive it every day? What would be the legal import of the cops tapping into my car's battery and draining it? And, of course, when I took it into the shop and they found the electrical parasite, it would be removed, so this doesn't seem to be a very smart way to power a secret GPS gadget.
You could use a solar charger, but those are sorta hard to conceal.
Anyone know how these things are powered, and how long they can run without either draining the car's battery or dying because their own battery is dead?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
They are probably partially turned off, as in not returning location. They can probably still receive a cellular signal.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
Sir:
Please return the other GPS that is attached in the vicinity of the right wheel well. (You may have to get down on the ground to access it.) This happens to be the property of the Federal Government. We have enclosed a box with an address so that you may drop it off within the next ten days at the nearest mailbox at your convenience. No questions will be asked. Thank you in afvance for your cooperation.
This will prevent us from coming to retrieve the aforementioned property in person. In the middle of the night, no less.
Your friendly neighborhood federal agent
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/scotusjones.pdf
Wouldn't it be a laugh if they found out that a lot of them had already been removed and stuck to the undercarrage of some random over the road semi?
Geek Hillbilly
Yup. One nuclear bomb and one kilo of anthrax spores are also small numbers.
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.
In fact, reading the opinions, it would appear that all the justices (except maybe Sottomayor) would allow GPS devices installed without a warrant for short term tracking.
Of course, the Justice department usually prefers err on the safe side.
That you, RMS?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Or, Mr. Weissmann, you and the FBI could have just picked up a copy of the Constitution. Even a cursory reading of the 4th Amendment would have told the FBI that affixing a GPS device to someone's vehicle without even the nicety of having paid a judge a visit was eventually going to get the lot of you in a legal pickle and likely mean the Supreme Court would toss it out.
I recommend the FBI get a copy of the Constitution. It's available at your local library, at many bookstores. Hell, there's got to be a hundred thousand websites out there that have the full text.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I recently set up an entire GPS platform for our fleet at work. Security was an issue so I purchased the platform and run it in house on a server I built. Currently have 200 assets, but the platform will handle 5000.
They are probably using a device similar to an Enfora modem. These are cellular only, and fairly basic, although they can be configured to reports certain parameters such as ignition on, motion detection, geofencing, etc.
At the other end of the scale you can have a dual band device like the i50B which is Iridium satellite and cellular. The satellite kicks in depending on threshold setting for cellular signal strength. Of course there are MANY similar devices that run on different satellite networks (Global sat etc).
Reporting can be from every 30 seconds to once per day.
The devices are hard wired and use very little juice. You would never notice them. Both the devices mentioned are slightly larger than a pack of smokes and need power and ground. For the best reception an antenna is required, but that is also very easy to hide. Installation would be less than 30 minutes.
Interestingly, jammers are becoming a real problem. You can purchase them online, they only block the GPS frequency, and plug in to your cigarette lighter. Think Taxi cab drivers and truckers.
And how many agents do they have? For that matter, do you really think we have THREE THOUSAND terrorists in our country? Or how about this, 3000 THAT WE KNOW ABOUT?
Neither do I. So who the hell are they tracking, and why? That's a lot of law enforcement abuse of powers there, probably 3000 cases of it. Want to guess how many decades that would take to go through court if you tried to prosecute all of them? (Yeah, we have a lot of courts around the country, but those cases would be clustered in just a few.)
3000 is a small percentage of the total populace, it however is not a small quantity of abuses of power.
I recommend the FBI get a copy of the Constitution. It's available at your local library
Hmm, isn't checking documents out of the library an action that leads to you ending up on a list of some sort? I agree; it's good to encourage our government agents to use library facilities.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
It just struck me. This means they don't know either where the owner of that vehicle works or lives, otherwise they'd have an address to go to for retrieval purposes.
WTH! Were they just sticking them on random cars in a McDonalds or something?
2999, I stuck mine to the bottom of a carnival ride trailer long time back.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The point is it should NEVER happen.
Actually the point is it should never happen WITHOUT a warrant.
And clearly they haven't got enough for a warrant. Seeing as how it takes so little to get a warrant that they have no reluctance to ask for one to retrieve 500 worth of property. Apparently a crime on par with petty theft is enough to get you tracked.
Since these were all illegal, why not force them to reveal to the tracked parties their tracking activities and ask for the devices back. They may face legal action, but so what? The supreme court didn't make new law, it just stated what was the law all along. Placing the trackers with out a warrant was always a crime.
Either that or The FBI could seek a warrant for their continued use. Surely after tracking these suspects for how ever many weeks it took for the case to find its way through the courts they must have evidence of something that rises to the level of petty theft.
Instead they get a second byte of the apple, by being allowed to peek in windows and perhaps trespass under the guise of retrieving government property. No bad deed goes unrewarded.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It would almost have to be the latter. Otherwise they would just go get the warrants now rather than turn them off. Or at most, they would get a warrant and turn them back on then rather than seeking permission to turn them on just long enough to retrieve them.
There may be plenty of the former as well not counted amongst the 3000.
Which then in turn raises a serious question - we've seen hackers prosecuted and jailed for their activities, but what kind of punishment can we expect for those responsible for the violation of Jones's Fourth Amendment rights? My money is on "none". The SCOTUS ruling doesn't mean anything at all without some kind of consequences for those responsible, as there's nothing to keep the guilty parties from willfully doing it again. And I'm not talking about some stupid fine or something that means nothing to the individual agents that made the decision to violate his civil rights. I'm talking about jail time for those who placed the devices, and their supervisors who signed off on it.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Why not? They forgot that that they're a law enforcement agency rather than a band of vigilantes.
The 3000 were just for ones without warrants.
Hard to tell, the article is light on details. That's one possible interpretation. Here's another: there were actually much more than 3000 warrant-less trackers out there. After they lost the case, the FBI tried to get warrants for all the existing trackers. Most of those requests were granted, like they usually are, and the 3000 are the ones where they were denied.
My guess is the former is the main reason. Why go to the court for something you don't need to go to the court for? Indeed, if you genuinely believed that there was no need to get court approval for something, it'd be positively irresponsible to keep going to court about it- a big waste of expensive court time.
But then, there's no saying how many of the investigations are too flimsy to have stood up in court. That's exactly why we force law enforcement to get warrants for things- to weed out flimsy cases. Without that check in place, god knows how many shoddy cases were nodded through.
if the 3000 cases weren't flimsy, they could easily get a warrant on them. that they'd need a "rollback" warrant on their own actions(to retrieve the devices..) directly implies that those 3000 cases wouldn't have gotten warrants for the surveillance.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
For that matter, do you really think we have THREE THOUSAND terrorists in our country?
Not to defend the warrant-less trackers but do you really think the FBI only monitors and investigates suspected terrorists? They also deal with any crime that happens on Federal lands, crimes that cross state lines such as kidnappings, murders, thefts, and much more. They aren't all there just to fuck with our freedoms, you know. Yes, some members of law enforcement are power hungry assholes. That's not all of them, however, and you do a dis-service to the good ones when you forget it or trivialize what they actually do.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
It is subject to the terms of Part 95 of the FCC rules. You don't need an individual operator or station license (as you do for amateur radio), but there ARE legal limitations on what you can do over a CB.
One of the limitations is exactly what types of signals can be emitted over the CB channels. You are limited to AM or SSB voice. Digital data packets (such as from an APRS system) are NOT permitted.
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It's rare that I'll, you know, defend the government and all... but the FBI's purview extends way beyond terrorists. They handle organized crime in general, for one. I mean, the South American gangs like MS13 alone could account for a large portion of those GPS trackers. That doesn't even consider all of the other crime that they handle (bank robbery, wire fraud, etc.)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
After they lost the case, the FBI tried to get warrants for all the existing trackers. Most of those requests were granted, like they usually are, and the 3000 are the ones where they were denied.
I don't think that would help them. If you read the opinion of the Court carefully, you'll see that in the case decided, there was a warrant issued, but the tracking device was installed one day after the warrant expired and was installed in a different state than that for which the warrant was supposed to apply. I don't think retroactive warrants could be issued, and since the majority in the case found it was the trespassing act of installing the device which triggered the Fourth Amendment problem, I don't think the issuing of a warrant after the fact of installation would help the government.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?