Secret GPS Tracking Now Legal In Massachusetts 277
Posted
by
timothy
from the unsecret-kind-requires-anklet dept.
from the unsecret-kind-requires-anklet dept.
dr. fuzz writes "The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ruled in favor of John Law tracking you with secret GPS devices in Massachusetts provided a warrant is obtained. You've been warned. To the dissenters' credit, Justice Ralph Gants is quoted with 'Our constitutional analysis should focus on the privacy interest at risk from contemporaneous GPS monitoring, not simply the property interest.'"
Where is the controversy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Requires court order. Who has a problem with that? With a court order you can tap phones, plant bugs, install keystroke loggers, just about anything. Seems kinda daft to be maming a fuss about putting a GPS on somebody's car, hell just use the court order to get the cell company to give a feed from their phone.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:5, Insightful)
It talks about police and wiretapping so we'll get plenty of paranoid theories and the resulting jokes. Plus we're guaranteed a mangled Ben Franklin quote.
It directly mentions the constitution so we might even get the lingering Ron Paul supporter! I've missed those guys.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is an inherent problem with expanding the powers of the executive branch. Even if there's a lot of complaining about it at the time, there's not much incentive for the next guy to back out of those powers once they've been established. There was lots of complaining from some Republicans when Clinton made the FISA court into a rubber-stamping operation after Oklahoma City, but then they ignored FISA entirely after 9/11.
More on topic, I don't see much problem with giving the police broad crime fighting powers, provided there is proper oversight for abuse. A good warrant system can do that, and need not be much of a time burden if the right procedures are in place. But there better be something. Even the rubber-stamping FISA court at least created a paper trail.
Re:Jammers (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Advocates of this sort of thing say it is like having a police officer tail a person of interest. I'm sorry but it is not at all like that.
Prior to tracking by GPS, if the police wanted to track someone, they had to assign an officer, or multiple officers, to track him. This is the world we lived with, and this world is the context in which we reasoned about whether or not cops should be allowed to tail someone. I'm sure there was very little debate, if any, but that was because the scarcity of police relative to the population was a limit as to how many people the police could tail. It did not occur to us that the police would start tailing everybody, or even very many people. It was simply unimaginable that they would have the resources to invade the public's privacy
With the advent of GPS, we are now in a completely different economic-political context requiring that we must reconsider the issue and not simply continue right along with the policies put in place in a different world.
Where once police had to carefully consider whether or not it was worth the expenditure of their limited manpower to tail a person, they now no longer have to. Where once privacy protections were taken for granted by the very nature of what tailing people required, they can no longer be. It is reasonable to consider the possibility that GPS tracking could become widespread for all sorts of issues that would be considered minor, today. The police, as the costs of such tracking drop, will ask themselves "Why not?" The cost to society will be an enormous loss of privacy.
Don't let anyone try to tell you that there is no privacy issue because cops already tail people.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay. Well I'm one of the principle persons who quotes Franklin and other Founders, but in this case I have no objection. As long as the police have to get a warrant, then there's independent review by an impartial judge, who can reign-in the overzealous boys in blue.
The real problems happen when, as in the case of Professor Gates, police ignore the requirement for a warrant and just ram their way into homes/car where they don't belong. (Oh and no a phone call is not probable cause according to the supreme court.)
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Aren't you supposed to be there when a warrant is executed ?
So you know they're rummaging in your things.
The difference here, is that you would continue generating data without knowing there's a warrant in progress.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Had it been a search, it would have been unconstitutional.
It wasn't, and you repeating it ad-nauseum doesn't make it so. It was a police officer investigating a reported crime following the suspect. The suspect met the officer at the door and then walked away, back into the scene of the alleged crime.
If you owned a business and a police officer found an open door at 2AM, you'd feel pretty good if he entered the premises and caught the guy prying your cash register open, yes? Or should the cop think "nothing suspicious here, I'll just move along"?
If someone was breaking into my house and the cops showed up, met the guy at the door, and then didn't bother following him because he went back inside my house, I'd be REALLY PISSED -- at the cops. If the guy got away because he slipped out the back before reinforcements arrived, I'd be REALLY REALLY pissed at the cops.
And if the suspect went back into the house to retrieve a gun so he could shoot the cop, you'd probably be dancing in the streets that yet another jack-booted thug was put down, huh? Hate to break your bubble, but the courts have consistently supported the right of the cops to frisk a suspect for the purpose of ensuring their own safety. Following the suspect through an open door as he walks back into the scene of a reported crime to ensure their own safety is not beyond the pale.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Warrants for Police (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it is absolutely critical to distinguish between a warrant-based system for Evidence Gathering by Law Enforcement and a system of Intelligence Gathering by Military Offices. Wire-tapping without a warrant to introduce evidence in a criminal prosecution is a no-no. It is, however, completely distinct from gather intelligence or recon data abroad to target enemy soldiers, spies, and saboteurs. If somebody a valid target to be shot up by a predator drone without a trial then bugging their phone calls isn't really a 4th Amendment issue.
MA state and local policy investigators are part of Law Enforcement and thus all their searches, seizures, wiretaps, and electronic monitoring are subject to warrant requirements.
Re:Jammers (Score:4, Insightful)
The jammer is a big red arrow that points straight at you. That sort of defeats the purpose if you want to remain inconspicuous.
Re:What the hell is wrong with that state? (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't "fly into a panic". She didn't just walk into an airport with a blinking light attached to her.
She walked into an airport with a blinking electronic device AND DELIBERATELY IGNORED A SIMPLE QUESTION ASKED TO HER BY AN AIRPORT EMPLOYEE. That is either stupid ("I don't have to deal with airport employees") or arrogant ("Airport employees are beneath my level of acknowledgement") or both.
That employee reported the situation, which is hardly "fly[ing] into a panic".
The police came to investigate the situation, knowing in advance that they were dealing with an uncooperative subject.
Nobody panicked. The nitwit with the blinky was a nitwit and acted like one. "She goes to MIT so she's socially incompetent" isn't an excuse. It is rarely smart to act like a nitwit when dealing with security issues, but enough people do that they have to put up signs that warn that jokes about bombs are not funny at TSA checkpoints.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:3, Insightful)
There was lots of complaining about the Patriot Act by the Democrats when Bush was in power and now it looks like they're going to renew most of it.
And what of the war in Iraq, where has the dissent on that from the Democrats gone? Where have the anti-war protesters gone? Or were they simply anti-republican?
Just adding a "the Democrats are just as bad" Ying to your "the Republicans are bad" Yang ;).
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is an inherent problem with expanding the powers of the executive branch. Even if there's a lot of complaining about it at the time, there's not much incentive for the next guy to back out of those powers once they've been established. There was lots of complaining from some Republicans when Clinton made the FISA court into a rubber-stamping operation after Oklahoma City, but then they ignored FISA entirely after 9/11.
There's another problem as well. Loyalty to political party is apparently more important than loyalty to the Constitution and checks and balances. Can you imagine the reaction from Congressional Republicans if Bill Clinton had been the one running the War on Terror?
Re:Warrants for Police (Score:3, Insightful)
This sort of thing makes me want to design devices to sniff these things out. Catching a few drug dealers is not a fair trade for such a loss of privacy.
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that court orders for various privacy invasions seem to be easier to get each year and more and more "exceptions" get invented. First allowing the court order after the fact and then creating a special rubber stamp court to issue them without any real questions asked and practically no consequences for abuses.
While in theory the police could keep tabs on someone of interest anyway, doing so without a tracking device requires substantial manpower and costs. That's a GOOD thing since the added costs force them to do so only when it's actually necessary rather than based on a vague suspicion (amongst a group of people who often have vague suspicions about everyone but themselves).
Re:Where is the controversy? (Score:3, Insightful)
So how are the police supposed to respond to a breakin-in-progress?
Gee, now I know how to get away with burglary... when the cops show up, just claim I live there and refuse to show any ID. Only the Nazis can just ask me for my ID, right?