Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found On SUV 761
jcombel writes with this excerpt:
"As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently. The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car. Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man."
You wish you were this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
What does a citizen have to do to get this kind of personalized attention from the government? Most of the time they just ignore you unless it's time for them to steal money from your wallet.
Re:You wish you were this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
>What does a citizen have to do to get this kind of personalized attention from the government?
Nothing.
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BMO
Re:Police Ssurveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the world of police intimidation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Police Ssurveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
In the same way that listening to a conversation by bugging a person is considered different from listening in on their conversation from a nearby table in a restaurant. One involves the compromise of someone's personal property and effects (protected by the 4th amendment) and the other doesn't.
Re:Welcome to the world of police intimidation (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't get that the point of this was to intimidate the reporter and discourage him from pursuing the story, you're either incredibly naive or you're being deliberately dense.
Re:Americans fear their government (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans fear their government more now than at any time in history. Kind of funny if your from foreignland.
Well, the american government fucked over entire nations in the course of the last 50 years, it is poetic justice that in the last years they have turned their attention to fucking over their own citizens instead.
Whats good for the goose is good for the gander no ?
Re:RTA (Score:5, Insightful)
The question here isn't whether the police ought to investigate criminal behavior, but whether they can use these tactics without a warrant. Big difference. If this guy really is so damn shady, they should have no trouble at all getting a warrant. If there's not even enough suspicion to get a warrant, he certainly deserves to be left alone.
Re:Police Ssurveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there a limit where it becomes harassment? It's one thing if they have enough evidence to get a warrant - it's another if they are fishing blindly.
Re:Police Ssurveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be such a law. You show me an efficient government and I will show you an oppressive one.
I was just following that logic to its inevitable conclusion.
A better answer would be the police could not follow him across state lines, nor onto private property. This device might. This device also is consuming the victims fuel to be transported and may be wired into his car risking damage to the electrical system.
Re:Simple solution to dealign with these trackers (Score:4, Insightful)
So if Driving Citizens (Score:5, Insightful)
have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by the police, do police therefore have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by citizens? Sounds like a great argument. Think I'll run out, buy a bunch of these trackers, and stick them to the undercarriages of cop cars and then set up a web site that reports the position of every cop car in the city at all times in case you, um, need to call the cops.
Either that must be the case, or cops must get a warrant to do this.
If neither is the case, then the only option left to Americans is to fire every single person in every level of government with extreme prejudice, convene a constitutional convention, and start all over again from scratch.
Re:You wish you were this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
He may have a drug dealing cousin, but the police should need a warrant for this type of intrusive tracking.
Papers please.
Re:Simple solution to dealign with these trackers (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know it's gov property? There's no identification on it. It's stuck to your property. I'd say you own it and are free to do with it as you please.
Re:You wish you were this guy (Score:4, Insightful)
So why did they not get a warrant?
Either they have a good reason to get one, or this is bullshit.
OK... (Score:4, Insightful)
So I agree that warrantless tracking is a bad thing. Let's get that out of the way right at the beginning.
What baffles me in this case is that they COULD HAVE GOTTEN A WARRANT!
Look. The guy's cousin is on the run for drug charges, possibly involving drug smuggling. Before taking off, he sells his car to this guy, who waits a month or two, then drives to Mexico, stays a few days, and then drives back. I'm not saying any of that is damning, but it would certainly raise questions in my mind if I were the local DEA or police representative. And assuming they had any evidence at all on the guy who fled the country, that ought to be enough to get a warrant to do some minimally invasive tracking. (Yes, it's invasive. But there isn't a person staring through his window all night, there's not an actual person following him around all the time, and so on.)
So why not go ask for a warrant? For that matter, why not ask for a warrant to do more checking on this guy and his cousin? THAT'S what bothers me about the whole thing. They had no particular reason to be underhanded about any of it, but they chose to anyway.
Re:RTFA: not random surveillance by the government (Score:3, Insightful)
So guilt by association is ok now? When did we make that change?
If it is so fucking likely that a warrant would be granted, then maybe they should have gotten one. Sounds like not only are they violating the spirit of the law if not the letter, they sure are not doing their jobs.
Re:You wish you were this guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh look, it's the Just World Fallacy.
"They're doing something to you so obviously you did something wrong"
Next time you get called for jury duty, tell them you believe in a just world and that only bad people get arrested.
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BMO
Re:Police Ssurveillance (Score:4, Insightful)
"Easier" and "more universal" does NOT constitute "fundamentally different". No judge would buy that argument either. Technology makes things easier, that doesn't mean you make those things harder to do. Overruled.
Bruce Schneier has addressed this exact issue. He did a good job explaining it by drawing our attention to the difference between these two police activities:
The difference is that we, as a society, consented to the low-grade surveillance of police officers driving around personally observing us... but the latter approach, with its many technological and informational advances, is a level of surveillance that we did not consent to, and WOULD NOT have consented to when we originally consented to the low-tech approach.
A good reason to withhold consent is that the collected information is not universally accessible. The information is kept by law enforcement for their own use. It will be used to prove you guilty, but you cannot use it (or even learn of its existence) to prove yourself not-guilty. It worsens the already serious power disparity between citizens and the executive branch.