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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."
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.
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
Gone!
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
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...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
Sir,
I am more than happy to comply. I have enclosed the object I located stuck to the bottom of my truck in the vicinity of the right wheel well. Although I am no expert and I don't really know what this GPS object of which you speak looks like, here it is. On my ranch, we have different names for these, depending on whether they are dried or still soft.
A cooperative citizen.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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 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.
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)