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