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.
Re:Operation: Fearstorm (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a Muslim (Score:2, Insightful)
.. and most of my friends do not care about this. It's part of the religion to care less about possible adversities as a result of your good action.
Albanian emigrant - one of those that were trapped by FBI via Egyptian scumbag into the army base plot - famously said to that informant at some point (pre-arrest, of course): "I do not care if you work for FBI, I will do what I have to do". (something to that avail).
That's the attitude unbelievers should learn from Muslims: if you stand for something right, do not be afraid of adversary consequences.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Insightful)
What a gentle and meaningful way to solve a problem!
Instead, why not drive a bugged vehicle to some interesting destinations?
After all, a paranoid Castle Doctrine threatening to execute federal workers or contractors wouldn't get you under any kind of real suspicion, would it? After all, this is just between us, right?
Motorcycles (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because the FBI sucks at finding good times to do these things. Good luck with that. They'll shoot you dead before you make it out your front door with your gun. Unless you happen to be that one navy seal who posts on slashdot, you lose in this confrontation.
Re:Bzzzt. Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another reason... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what the retarded thing is? The friend's comment that supposedly aroused suspicion is completely innocuous. All he's doing is pointing out how easy it is to attack the 99% of targets we haven't tried to harden, rather than the 1% we have, and concluding terrorism isn't much of a threat as a result.
Agree with his conclusions or disagree, it's hard to shake the idea that the FBI is punishing him because he had the nerve to think rationally, and point out how retarded our whole "anti-terrorism" thing is. How dare he see through the farce?!
Re:got spyware? (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you are an embarrassment to those of us who work hard to get things like Castle Doctrine in place, and then you interpret it, in complete ignorance, to mean that you can kill any person for any reason so long as they have a foot over your property line. I wouldn't be surprised if you were a false flag plant of gun control advocates out to make gun owners look bad.
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Insightful)
lawful execution by Castle Doctrine law.
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.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Well, to get to the power they would have to patch into some wires, or go in through the hood. Ignoring the fact that they do not own the gasoline that powers my vehicle, the interior of my vehicle is not a public place.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:5, Insightful)
and most of my friends do not care about this. It's part of the religion to care less about possible adversities as a result of your good action.
Yeah. See, *sane* people fight for the fucking rights their government is supposed to guarantee them. Shrugging your shoulders, grinning, and bearing it because you feel it's some tribulation placed upon you by god is a brilliant way to ensure your continued persecution at the hands of those who would use you as a scapegoat in an ugly political climate (like, say, a period dominated by a weak economy, a couple of ugly wars, and a highly divided populace).
You help *no one* with your high-minded apathy. All you do is enable the bigots and the opportunists, implicitly validating their actions by refusing to fight against them.
Re:Strange (Score:1, Insightful)
Ah yes, because we all know how much the libs just love the constitution... Hope and change! All the old NeoCon policies against American freedom were going to fall by the wayside! How's it going with the PATRIOT Act repeal again?
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:4, Insightful)
if you stand for something right, do not be afraid of adversary consequences.
Actually this is the attitude of all religious nuts. Extremist Christians blew up a Planned Parenthood in California last month even though it is clearly illegal. Israeli Extremists are occupying the West Bank, because they think it was given to them by God. All religious extremism has this same type of stupidity.
You interpreted his statement 180degrees. He was saying "Don't be afraid of what others will do to you" (ie expect to be brutalized for what you believe because people will misunderstand) Of course, he chose one of the _worst_ possible examples since the FBI clearly understood correctly that the dude wanted to attack an army base.
Re:Legal tracking. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I can tell, the FBI's only reason to place this bug on the guy's car is that he's "half Egyptian".
I suppose next is having your car bugged if you're half-Mexican (in Arizona) or half-a-fag, or half liberal, or have uTorrent installed on your computer, or don't go to church on Sunday or if you don't have a little metal fish attached to the back of your car.
What a second-rate nation the US has become in the past thirty years.
Re:Rules... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Motorcycles (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a lot harder to hide anything on a motorcycle than it is to hide something on a car.
Eh, sort of. When's the last time you looked at the underside of your engine block? While there are fewer places to hide things on a bike, even one is enough if you don't check it.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
and get it to the supreme court. if they say this is legal, burn it down. simple really.
Too late. SCOTUS has already changed the meaning of the Second Amendment to something the Founders never intended. The purpose of the Second was so that those that carried arms could organize and could protect others from our own government. Now, it means self-defense. From selfless to selfish in just two, well-publicized cases.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's cops up their asses. I think it's the same old tired kneejerk "TERRIST!" reaction we've seen ever since 9/11. Any time someone wants to do something that's blatantly unethical or illegal (like, say, waterboarding people, or kidnapping them, chaining them to the floor of an airplane, flying them to Syria, and having them tortured with methods up to and including administering electric shocks to their genitals) (Yes, this actually happened, many times - research "extraordinary rendition") they just run to a judge who may not particularly like the cops, but who is terrified of the terrorists, and claim that what they're doing might prevent a terrorist attack.
Well. Yes. It might. Hell, nuking the whole planet would prevent them too, but no one's suggesting that. Why not?
And then after they've been doing the waterboarding or the extraordinary rendition or the illegal surveillance, they say "Well see, we haven't had any terrorist attacks and therefore it must be working!" which is a completely illogical train of thought. We haven't had any dragon attacks either, but that doesn't mean that the little boy 2 houses down from me who keeps waving a plastic sword around to drive the dragons away is actually having an effect.
Yes, terrorists are out there and yes, we need to do everything we can to prevent them from pulling off another attack like that, but it has to be both logical and consistent with the laws of the land. To suddenly declare private property as public-property-for-the-purposes-of-government-spying goes against every founding principle of this country. To follow people around because of something they said in a political discussion on a message forum, or because they're not white enough, is un-American, unpatriotic, and anyone doing it or authorizing it should be jailed.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:3, Insightful)
Er, wouldnt you do what you think is right, irrespective of what others think about it? If thats the definition of a religious extremist, I would be an extremist too.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:1, Insightful)
Blowing up a concentration camp to free Jews would have been illegal. Godwin, whatever. If an ethical theory can't handle extremes it's not worthy of being called a theory. Somebody could easily justify blowing up a Planned Parenthood as an atheistic consequentialist with a life theory of value. Government is temporal, it's just another system-- People knowingly do illegal things all the time, like smoking pot, bringing their families across the US/Mexican border, etc. If you want to really criticize an action, 'illegal' is simply not an effective word to be using.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand the Holocaust was enabled by conformism.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
it's incredibly easy. Why would they have to have it hooked straight up the the battery? They can splice a wire and have it run off, and if it's hidden anywhere you pretty much wont' see it.
This is not complicated, but it is pretty scary and definitely something we should hope the supreme court will strike down soon.
Re:Legal tracking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:apparently under suspicion because he's half-Eg (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd bet that the FBI has no idea why the FBI bugged the man, except that some lazy SAC got a boxful and decided to put them on the car of anyone with brown skin or a middle-eastern name.
Remember, the burden of proof for why this tracking device was placed is always on the authorities who placed it. I really don't think you want a situation where someone has to explain why they should not have tracking devices on their car.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:2, Insightful)
This should go without saying, but law enforcement should give the benefit of the doubt to the suspect while investigating as carefully and fully as reasonably warranted. What "law enforcement" operates now basically boils down to is a bunch of blokes shoot up testosterone and then go out for blood as they are the most important persons on the face of the earth. Amen.
What the people here on slashdot are never going to understand is that the motivation for most men's actions is just the power trip.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:3, Insightful)
So your suggesting that If the people writing the laws tell you and action is wrong, that makes it intrinsically true? He said nothing about ignoring popular opinion, only that his ultimate choice of the correct course of action was not based on the personal consequences of said decision.
I hate to pull a godwin, but if you'd lived in Nazi Germany would you have sided [ethically] with the Nazis, simply because theirs was the prevailing ideology?
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:4, Insightful)
Or do.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to get a warrant, the cop has to swear to the judge that there's probable cause to believe there's some connection with a crime.
The 4th Amendment was written for situations like this and civil asset forfeiture. Our legal system has gotten turned completely upside down. Judges have forgotten that they're supposed to protect innocent victims, whether the perpetrators were other civilians or Congress.
Yes, there is the point about having a cop follow the suspect around all day. But cops are always short-handed, and technology like this lets them crack down tighter on the whole "Big Brother" thing. If they have to have an actual person dedicated to following the kid around, odds are they'll limit themselves to suspects who are actually worth investigating.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop kidding yourself. You're living in an extremely sinful country (according to Muslim beliefs) and enjoying its benefits. You don't want to move because of the adverse consequences to yourself. You said as much by saying, "it's not a very easy decision the last half of your life".
Re:got spyware? (Score:3, Insightful)
They're going to bust you for destruction of federal property. You can argue that it was put on your car on your property, but I wouldn't expect to get very far.
The lesson here is do not post to the internet about the issue until you've fully taken it apart and documented it.
Then post anonymously via an internet cafe or an unsecured wifi access point.
But please do make the effort so that the rest of us can find out as much about it as possible.
Re:got spyware? (Score:2, Insightful)
That is when having 3 or 4 Pit Bulls around is real handy ...kind of difficult accessing the underside of a car wit a Pit jaw locked on you’re ass
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
you can access the engine compartment from the underside of the car...
Not every car.
I know of several models where you have to have a pit or ramps to do anything significant under the vehicle. Sure, if you can find a person who is less than about 5" thick, they could get under the car, but that doesn't mean they could do any real work.
Also, the last few cars I have owned have skid plates [wikipedia.org] that basically cover the entire bottom of the engine compartment. Removing them without putting the car on a lift means that you're going to be taking over an hour to plant the tracking device.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
Haven't you heard, the US is a "Christian Nation"!
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't believe that's true.
Yes, we are a nation made up of people who predominantly self-identify as "Christians" when asked in a poll question, that's not really the best way to count. I would bet that if you asked people if they were "moral people" or "ethical people" we'd probably get 95% of people saying that of course, they were. That would hardly mean that 95% of Americans were either moral or ethical. Just that we like to think of ourselves that way.
On the other hand, if you were to ask people if their neighbors were "Christian" you would get a much lower number than you get when people are self-identifying. It's because calling yourself a Christian or a "person of faith" is a long sight from actually being so.
If you were to observe the people who call themselves "people of faith" you'd find that only a fraction of them really are. Most would probably turn out to be people who say a little prayer when they're betting on red or when they're afraid their wives are going to find out they've been banging the neighbor or when they're running for office.
But I agree with you that to even suggest that "half-Egyptian" means you deserve to have surveillance put on you (even if your dad did die last year on a trip to Egypt) is to suggest that the American experiment is a complete failure, which it may well be.
I think the main takeaway from the past few decades is that the United States has turned into a second-rate nation. And not for the reasons that the Tea Party would have you believe. It's because we've turned over our society, our culture and our government to investors who have not turned out to have our best interests at heart. We knew going in that multinational corporations were going to put profits ahead of the best interests of the country, so we shouldn't be a bit surprised. We knew going in that "supply-side" economics was a scam to concentrate wealth in a very few people. But apparently, the siren song of cheap consumer goods and E-Z credit was much stronger than our desire to fulfill the promise of our Founding Fathers. So corporate governance needs fear of the "other" and a selfishness that masquerades as "Liberty" to stay in power, which has begotten "libertarians" and the "tea party", so we end up, paradoxically, with a country that's on lock-down both physically and intellectually, where everyone is more worried about the abstract "national debt" than the very real credit card balances they've been racking up. Misdirection. Promoting make-believe Liberty in order to enslave a people is not a new idea, but in the hands of big money and corporate media, it's effective beyond belief.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, but at least most Americans until the '80s had a reasonable expectation that their kids would have a better life than they had, which for a parent is as much as one can hope. Whether you're talking about financially, or civil rights, or education, or however you measure "quality of life", things were getting a little bit better for each generation.
Starting in the early 90's, after supply-side economics really started to do it's dirty work, the realization set in that our kids would not have it nearly as well unless you were a member of the top few percent. The trend accelerates.
Re:get a lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
If there is any way to evaluate the "truth" of a religion, I would say "based on the behavior of its adherents" is high on the list.
But of course, you and I both know that evaluating the "truth" of a religion is like evaluating the mass of a poem.
Re:I am a Muslim (Score:3, Insightful)