Careful What You Post, the FBI Has More of These 761
jamie writes "A comment posted to a website got its author's *friend's* car an unwanted aftermarket addon. The Orion Guardian ST820, a GPS tracking device, was attached to the underside of the car by the FBI. No warrant required. The bugged friend, a college student studying marketing, was apparently under suspicion because he's half-Egyptian. As Bruce Schneier says, 'If they're doing this to someone so tangentially connected to a vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog, just how many of us have tracking devices on our cars right now ...' The ACLU is investigating." This follows up on our earlier mention of the same student, who turned the tracking device over to the FBI.
get a lawsuit (Score:4, Informative)
Obscure? (Score:1, Informative)
The post was on reddit so was hardly an obscure blog.
Bzzzt. Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, this article doesn't "follow up" on jack. It's just less informative and more inflammatory than the original.
He wasn't being tracked becasue of a blog post at all. His father was a notable political figure, and he travels and sends money to suspicious locations. From the article linked on the original slashdot story:
Obscurity (Score:3, Informative)
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Informative)
Try this on my property, you WILL get shot. No warrant, not invited, attempting to tamper with something of mine means risking lawful execution by Castle Doctrine law.
Ignore the Constitution by taking some judge's opinion over the written law at your own risk.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:4, Informative)
I'd recommend you go look at the pictures of the device that have been posted. It will not be hard to recognize. And this is not a thing they can easily disguise, the biggest part of it is a battery.
http://www.google.com/images?q=fbi+tracking+device&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1600&bih=1047 [google.com]
Here's a story about this from August (Score:5, Informative)
The link can be searched on Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000 [google.co.uk]
Here is the text from when it was active as the best I can do:
The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.) It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich. This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside. After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.) In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy. The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.) Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night. Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."
I don't know how well this stands, but hey, it's something!
Re:Possible easy means of detection. (Score:3, Informative)
Too many variables. 1/2 gallon of gas either way would more than make up the difference.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Informative)
A former FBI agent commented on one of the stories that this is a rather old model, the newer ones hook in in the engine compartment directly to power and don't need batteries, so it might be harder then you think.
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Informative)
It greatly depends on what state you are in.
In Texas [state.tx.us], for example, if you saw somebody tampering with your car at night you would be justified in using lethal force to stop them in many cases.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Informative)
If it happened at night and in Texas it just might. Note the section on criminal mischief:
Sec. 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY. A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
(1) if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41; and
(2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
(A) to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or
(B) to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property; and
(3) he reasonably believes that:
(A) the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means; or
(B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.
So what is criminal mischief?
Sec. 28.03. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF. (a) A person commits an offense if, without the effective consent of the owner:
(1) he intentionally or knowingly damages or destroys the tangible property of the owner;
(2) he intentionally or knowingly tampers with the tangible property of the owner and causes pecuniary loss or substantial inconvenience to the owner or a third person; or
(3) he intentionally or knowingly makes markings, including inscriptions, slogans, drawings, or paintings, on the tangible property of the owner.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Informative)
That presumption of innocence exists in court, and nowhere else. If it existed outside of the court, there would be no way to conduct an investigation - if you presume someone is innocent, how can you justify a warrant? Suspicion can only exist if there is no presumption of innocence. They are mutually exclusive. In court, the presumption exists until the prosecution proves otherwise.
There are, however, rules about how an investigation can be conducted, and apparently for the time being attaching a tracking device to a person's car is legal.
To me, it seems borderline at best (i.e. without the device they'd just have a cop tail his car all day), but still I'd rather see a warrant for it, at the very least so that there is a public paper trail.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Informative)
And, like it or not (and I don't), the Ninth Circuit has declared this to be consistent with due process, thus they are gathering evidence perfectly legally.
Of course, as many here like to point out, legal != ethical, and I think the Ninth Circuit judges have too many cops up their collective asses to see rationally, but as the law stands at the moment, there doesn't seem to be a problem with due process here. I'm not a fan of the ACLU very often, but I'm cheering for them on this one.
Re:got spyware? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Rules... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rules... (Score:3, Informative)
If I find a device on my car and I don't know you put it there. It's mine, period.
You can safely assume that if I find a device on my car, it's going to "fall off" on some heavily traveled road. If it happens to be a GPS tracking device, then you'll know exactly where to look when you want to collect data about its durability.
Re:His dad was frmr Pres. of Muslim Community Asso (Score:3, Informative)
I normally don't respond to Anonymous Jackoffs, but do you know anything about the Muslim Community Association? They're the largest Muslim community group in the US and there has never been anything that shows they have any ties to any terrorist or extremist groups. The MCA are not fundamentalists, they're not extremists. Until you're ready to have surveillance on every person who listens to Glenn Beck, you need to re-think your notion that every Muslim in the US should have trackers placed on their cars.
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Informative)
Can you tell me the last time a citizen was able to successfully use weapons to defend his property from 'intrusion' by any determined authority, local or federal? Rambo fantasies are so lame.
The Branch Davidians stopped the initial attempt [youtube.com] of the authorities to enter their compound using their weapons. We'll never know how long they really could have held out - assuming the fire was started by them.
"Stolen currency tracking" device (Score:5, Informative)
The device shown has the FCC ID number "O9EQ2438F-M" on the outside of the box, as required by law. FCC ID numbers can be looked up in the FCC database, [fcc.gov] where details of the device and pictures of the electronics are available. It's a cell phone module, of course. The FCC was told it was for "stolen currency tracking". The maker was Wavecom, since acquired by Sierra Wireless. The unit dates from 2005.
That's just a standard RF module. That application covers the addition of a spread-spectrum module to upgrade the cell access to support PCS networks. The base device, according to the FCC application, is FCC ID NBI-MTAG216. This is more interesting. It's a "Trac Pak V", from "Spectrum Management LLC" of Carrolton, TX.
When the spread-spectrum module was added, the company issued a press release about it. [findarticles.com] "Spectrum Management, L.L.C. [sm-ets.com], a global provider of innovative physical and electronic security products which include its proprietary asset tracking and management systems, announced today the completion of its TracPac CS Tag and the development of an all-new web-based tracking and location system. Spectrum has combined technologies with Wavecom, a leading provider of pre-packaged wireless communications solutions for automotive, industrial and mobile professional applications, with a wide range of fully integrated modules and modems. The new Tag design pairs Wavecom's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) module with GPSOne, and Spectrum's proprietary VHF homing technology to provide a wide range of Location Based Services (LBS). Spectrum Management expects to offer similar tracking and location services on Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications by simply substituting Wavecom's plug-in compatible GSM module."
Spectrum Management's predecessor company was ProNet, which was a public company in the 1990s. [sec.gov] They were acquired by Metrocall, and the tracking business was split off as Electronic Tracking Systems. They started as a pager company, but branched out into tracking devices. From their SEC filing: [sec.gov] "In 1988, the Company began to apply advanced wireless technology to the security business by marketing radio-activated electronic tracking systems to financial institutions. At December 31, 1996, the Company's security systems consisted of 29,501 miniature radio transmitters, or "TracPacs," in service." Most of these were leased to banks, and attached to items of value or hidden in bundles of currency. The 1990s model was a pre-GPS technology; they had to get local cops to install receivers (like LoJack does) for this to work. So it only worked in a few markets, and they were having trouble expanding, from their SEC filings. The newer technology doesn't have that limitation.
So it's a stock piece of law enforcement equipment, circa 2005.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Informative)
Right, which is why police don't need a warrant to search you unless you are in a courtroom. Oh wait. Never mind ...
Re:How can the GPS work under a car? (Score:3, Informative)
RF doesn't get blocked by metal and other surfaces. Rather: sometimes it reflects off in some other direction, and sometimes it gets absorbed and turned into (typically a very tiny amount of) heat or electricity, and whatever is left passes through with whatever amount of attenuation.
The ground/asphalt/bitumen/tarmac/concrete under the car is no exception to this: some signal bounces off of them. Reflected signals tend to be less accurate than direct line-of-sight signals, but then fixing a GPS position on a suspect's car doesn't have to be accurate down to one centimeter once every second. Locating them within several tens of meters, every few minutes, is likely quite good enough to figure out what the person (or rather, their car) is up to.
And it doesn't even matter if the car moves or not: The GPS satellites do quite a lot of that, by themselves, being in LEO. Eventually, sufficient signal -will- reach the receiver that it can locate itself with reasonable accuracy, either because the car has moved or the satellites continue to.
I've used GPS receivers in the back of windowless steel cargo vans and achieved reasonable accuracy. I suspect that being under a car, with a clear view of (at least) the ground in at least one direction is even better. I haven't tossed a GPS device under there to be sure, but come on.
Even my Droid can get a decent GPS fix within my own 2-story steel-roofed house with trees all around, and the GPS receiver in there is (at best) an afterthought.
And nevermind other rather common tech like WAAS helps with NLOS location, as well.
Getting useful data from a GPS receiver stuck to the bottom of a car with a magnet or something sounds perfectly plausible to me.