Court says police can use GPS to track anyone
I haven't managed to become dependent on GPS yet.
It seems to be quite fun when you're driving in strange areas of America. But I'm not sure I want to hear a voice telling me where to go all the time. It's all a little too, well, corporate for me. Or a little too like a 20-year-old marriage.
However, I was moved to virtual paralysis when I learned that an appeals court in Wisconsin decided that police can stick a GPS-tracking device on anyone they want without getting a search warrant. Even if that person is not suspected of anything more than living, breathing and expectorating.
The Fourth District U.S. Court of Appeals doesn't seem terribly happy about its own decision. However, the court decided, after much rumination, that GPS does not involve searching and seizing.
Which means that any information gained by sticking a secret GPS-tracking device on someone's car will only yield information that could have been gleaned through normal visual surveillance.
Some might wonder, normal visual surveillance by whom? R2D2? Spiderman?
"Sir, I believe I know precisely who sculpted those sideburns for you. Do you want her husband to know?"
(Credit: CC Greenbroke/Flickr)The decision stemmed from a case against Michael Sveum, a Madison resident who was accused of stalking. In his case, police got a warrant to slip a GPS on his car.
Sveum argued that this contravened his Fourth Amendment rights, which protect him against unreasonable search and seizure. His lawyers said that he was followed out of the public view, in intimate places such as his garage.
The court begged to differ, declaring that an officer could have used his eyes to see when Sveum entered and left his garage.
I don't know about you, but I'm a little disquieted about this. Imagine if you'd met a nice person in a bar. Having spent some considerable overnight time with this person, you discover that this person is the lover of a police officer.
This ruling seems to say that the officer can track your every movement by sticking a GPS on your chassis with a view to sticking a haymaker on your chin. Yes, this might sound a somewhat unlikely example. But surely you see the point.
Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU in Wisconsin, does. He told the Chicago Tribune: "The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else's property without any court supervision, that's wrong. Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want."
Even the appeals court itself is "more than a little troubled" by its own misdirected thinking and suggested that lawmakers in Wisconsin regulate the use of GPS by its officials.
I have a theory, however. I believe the court made this decision because it wants the police to track every single movement taken by former Green Bay quarterback and legendary mind-changing diva Brett Favre.
The Cheeseheads want to know whether he's staying retired or whether he's thinking of unretiring yet again, don't they?
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' - Benjamin Franklin
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American Flag." Sen. Huey Long
But my biggest issue is that to plant the device they have to place it somewhere on your body or property and in doing so doesn't that in fact violate search and seizure or some other protected right?
"Those that would sacrifice a little freedom for security deserve neither and will lose both."
track your BODY.
Also, would it be legal to take the device and attach it to the next semi leaving town? I mean, if THEY can attach it without a warrant, why can't I?
If you find GPS attached to your car, you
- cannot remove it from the car and/or attach it to another car - it would be interfering with police investigation;
- cannot destroy, damage, disable, or reprogram the device - it's property of police department;
What investigation? Does the person under surveillance know that he is being investigated? If he is engaged in illegal activity then you can expect that law enforcement is watching you. However if you are not suspected of a crime you are not being investigated, you are being fished.
If this becomes law then we can be sure it will be tested in the Supreme Court sooner rather than later.
I can just see the "investigation / travel request" to the Chief of Police. "Sir, our device is some where in the N. Central Pacific <Ocean>, west bound; we've got to go find our where this vehicle is. Might be a stolen car / truck stashed away in a container and being sold overseas. We've gotta' go protect our citizens' property."
And the D.A.'s office will want to send 3 of their top people to make certain the investigation is not fouled up ... <<grin>>
All this of course on the public dime.
As a private investigator, I've used them, so far only by permission, but they are generally more trouble than you would expect.
It is unlikley police would ever track anyone unless they were already under investigation and therefore subject to visual surveillance. Any officer who appropriates goverment property or services for personal use, for instance, to track a cheating spouse, has committed a crime and should be prosecuted or sued.
John Q. Citizen has little to fear that the police will install a tracking device on his vehicle. They don't have the time, the funds, or the inclination to follow people they don't aready suspect of some crime.
Most GPS devices only show where the device or vehicle is located although you can deduce average speed by measuring the time between points. They don't take pictures , listen to or record conversations. Listening devices still require a warrant. GPS trackers don't provide any information that could not be obtained by simply following the suspect, which they don't need a warrant t do.
If they place the device inside the passenger compartment or trunk of the vehicle they still need a warrant.
If you want to pay the money, it would be perfectly legal for you to put one on a police car and follow them as well, but I don't recommend it because there are ways to find out who is using the device.
Unless you are a criminal, worrying about the police following you is more than a bit paranoid. Not much of what we do interests them at all. Police currently have the capability via infrared imagery to scan your house and determine where you are inside the house and get a general idea about what you are doing by your heat signature, but they don't, because they couldn't care less. Almost all police helicopters have infrared scanners on them, you can probably find the videos on youtube. That is way more intrusive than a GPS tracker.
If you want to worry about something, worry about why, when big insurance, bank, investment, and auto executives do LOUSY jobs they get million dollar bonuses paid for with your tax dollars, but when the average person does a lousy job, they get fired, but still have to pay income taxes on their unemployment checks. I think that is way more worthy than criticizing the police who are trying to save tax dollars and improve efficiency.
I smell an IPhone App where all the cop cars have "secret" gps devices and you can see them moving on Google Maps. Better than a radar detector and perfectly legal in all 50 states.
Props to the Wisconsin Appeals Court.
As far as I know, NO police agency has the capability to track you(by Thermal Imaging) inside your home, unless it's through an open window or someplace NOT surrounded by glass or other materials. If any police department DOES have that capability it most certainly is NOT in common use! Probably most police helicopters have TI cameras, but they have limitations.
It probably would not be a good iea to track a police car in real time, but the information may be available via the FoI (Freedom of Information) act to get records of past use, assuming the squad has GPS and the information is recorded by the agency.
BTW, don't try attaching a GPS transmitter to someone elses verhicle in Illinois--it is NOT lgal in most cases!
The two problems with that is:
1. In this country it is up to the courts to decide if a person is a criminal or if enough evidence suggest that more investigation is needed (i.e. issue a warrent). This ruling states that a warrent is not needed and therefore any officer can do it for any or no reason at all.
2. As with any other technology, this will get cheaper and cheaper and more features will be added. Perhaps it will once be so cheap that the cost is negligible and police can track all US citizens at all times.
Sooner or later this issue will have to be decided for all of us - perhaps in supreme court.
Many people share that poster's insidious views. When government power reaches the tipping point, the power-hungry and their boot-lickers are delighted to kick ass and take prisoners.
Runaway slaves and those who aided them were not law abiding citizens, and neither were Rosa Parks or M. L. King. The American colonists broke British laws, the Jews broke Nazi laws, and the Tiananmen Square students broke Chinese laws. Oft-times the right and just side is the side of the lawbreaker.
It is legal for police to put tracking device on private citizen's car because police could collect same information by following that car. Applying same logic it is legal for private citizen to put tracking device on police car because it is legal to follow police car and report its location.
GPS device is relatively cheap, millions of volunteers throughout the country may put GPS devices on police cars and then you may see on Google Maps in real time where they are. Of course police is always one step ahead of us and before we manage to monitor movement of police cars, well, there would be no police cars, automated system would write traffic tickets without any human interaction.
No more speeding tickets for me!!!
For a contrary ruling, see Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001) (holding that information that could not be seized without a physical invasion, but that is in fact seized through the use of a technology not generally available to the public, constitutes an illegal search and is inadmissible at trial).
There is also another case where police were able to scrape dirt off of a suspect's tires in a parking lot because it was a public place and didn't involve violating the suspect's privacy in any way. The basic idea is that anyone could have access to the outside of your car when it is in a public place.
Clearly the court of appeals in this situation thought it was a logical extension to combine the two holdings and apply them to tracking a car (since it is almost always in a potentially viewable public place anyways).
This will probably get invalidated once the police track a car-jacker into a large garage on public property and the car is packed into a truck (fast and furious style). The resulting bust would be completely analogous to the "coffee looking like drugs" case and would allow a court to easily invalidate this kind of tracking.
This is a simple property issue. Either your property is yours and secure from tampering (vandalism) and/or theft of service (transportation of a third party device unauthorized by you) or then, by logical extension, whenever a police office decides he needs to watch you closely, you should be forced to ride him.her around all day so they can watch and record your daily movements/habits. The search is obvious - you've got data you couldn't obtain easily without my knowledge (I can see you in my rearview mirror), and you've obtained it by theft of service (hitching a ride on my car). By the way, evidence obtained illegally is deemed "Fruit of the poison tree", which means that that evidence is deemed 'poisonous' and is thrown out of any court proceedings as 'tainted' evidence.
If I'm off base, and these black robed 'kings' want to try and argue their way out of the hole they've dug themselves in, I'm ready for a few laughs. How can they justify GPS tracking, but aren't allowed to order 'On*Star', or 'LOJack' to hand over the details of all their customers' coming and goings, date/time, distance/speed etc. so that they could just automatically issue speeding tickets to those they didn't catch the traditional way?
BTW - Some folks here just don't get it, nor do they deserve the freedoms they're losing :-). The smart ones already have a plan and one foot 'out the door'. The rest of you can bend over and let the cops give you a look-see and/or force you to 'carry' a GPS transceiver, video camera and microphone, since it's "not a search", I'm sure you'll be jumping at the chance to volunteer your private life to the GUbbament. What do you have to hide? LOL.... Meanwhile, us smart ones will laugh at what used to be a great country, but was turned into the world's first modern, third world country, police state - just like 1984 - Socially enginerred, minions, working for the benefit of your masters the "proletariat", all the while smiling happily that you're secure in your endless work cycle subsisting on rice and potatoes not having to worry about thinking, because it's done for you. Welcome to your New World Order - I' m just bursting with enthusiasm for the "CHANGE" you think is for your benefit.
I leave you with this. The easiest way to control a population is to make them think they're free. All you do is call, fascism "freedom" and convince everyone that this "freedom" requires 'sacrifice' for the betterment of 'society'. Then you demonize all that disagree by calling them 'extremists', 'intolerant', 'bigoted', 'religious nuts', 'homophobes', etc...[insert name here]....By this time, everyone (the socially engineered Sheeple) will help Big Brother finalize control over everything by weeding out the outsiders (AKA: Thought Criminals). They will either be 're-edumacated' or 'removed' from society as 'terrorists'. Meanwhile, you'll be watching the public executions as if these people were Taliban militants, because you've been engineered to see them so.
Exciting times are upon us in these last days.
The other records such as Onstar may already be available by subpeona.
If the police choose to tail a person with a squad car, does the "suspect" have to pay for the gasoline used by the squad car? No, or course not, that's preposterous!
What iIf the police decided to tag their car with a GPS, which adds some weight to the car? That weight requires energy to move it, and that energy is provided by the gasoline purchased for the "suspect's" car. Sure, a 1lb GPS logger/transponder doesn't make much of a difference on a 2000lb car. But what police never both to take it off (i.e. it stops working and they loose track of the car, so they can never remove it)? Hauling an extra pound around for a few hundred thousand miles will eventually add up to a measurable amount of cash. If/when the technology gets cheap enough to tag everybody's car, who's going to foot the bill for all the extra energy that is consumed?
Second, say somebody owns a 20,000-acre ranch -- will the GPS automatically shut off as soon as they enter their private property? The old-fashioned way, without a warrant, the police would have to stop following as soon as the "suspect" entered the private party. What right do the police have to know where somebody goes on their private property? The courts shot down the argument that the garage's status of private party made the GPS attachment a "search" -- but a 20,000-acre ranch with multiple buildings, multiple private roads and trails, possibly even multiple residences -- that's a quite different from a two-car garage.
This also opens up questions about jurisdiction. Are the police from one state allowed to surveil suspects when they cross state boundaries? What about national boundaries? I'm pretty sure that the US does not allow Mexican or Canadian police to surveil people freely within our borders, and vice versa. Saying that the GPS technology is analogous to physical surveillance overlooks these legal considerations.
As the technology improves and the cost drops, an important change takes place. One protection against abuse of power (i.e. surveilling everybody all the time) is that it is resource intensive -- from the perspective of the government/police, the benefits outweigh the costs. Those that say that the police would never bother trailing innocent people with this technology are ignoring the fact that as the cost gets lower, it will get used more and more. Heck, the police could have been doing this 20 years ago, but weren't because it was way too expensive back then. It's starting to get cheap, and in another 5-10 years it will be DIRT cheap (i.e. $10 for the GPS hardware, and negligible cost to process and store the electronic data). The police can't possibly track everybody now, but soon technology will make it possible. When the price reaches that point, what reason will the police have to not surveil everybody?
- by man_w_balls May 11, 2009 9:15 AM PDT
- To hell with the Police State bull$hit! Concerned citizens should be making moves to counteract each and every one of these infringements of our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (55 Comments)1) Anonymous ISP services to counter warrantless wiretapping - Concerned citizens should band together to start a totally anonymous ISP company, like Sweden or Switzerland has now.
2) Anti-GPS or GPS jamming devices for personal use, to counter the madness brought upon us by this court ruling.
3) Self-sufficiency to limit the money you give to the big corporations that own our government
4) ETC