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FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling
- alister 15y ago>prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use When I read the figure of 3000, I ricocheted between being shocked at the large number of people being tracked, then realized that it's actually tiny compared to the US population of 313M, and then back to be being dismayed that it's not so small after doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Here's my thinking: The US has 254M registered vehicles (Wikipedia), but cars are shared within families and the average family size is 2.6 (US census). If we further assume that a subject is tracked for about a month, the tracking device gets used on ~10 vehicles per year. Hence, 254000000/3000/2.6/10 = 3256. So your chances of regularly riding in a "bugged" vehicle during the year are 1 in 3256. I have more than 3256 accumulated contacts in my email -- probably you do too. Conclusion: It's very likely that you know someone who's vehicle is being tracked by the FBI this year.
- mickey7 15y ago~80% of americans own a cellphone your chances of being tracked are 1/1
- foobarbazetc 15y agoThey can track you via your phone already. The dedicated devices are presumably more reliable for them and were used so they didn't have to get a warrant for phone tracking.
- alister 15y agoGood point. Considering that the phone companies have a long history of secretly sharing foreign call data with the NSA, and a recent history of secretly sharing domestic call data as well, we can expect more of the same. Rather than fighting this Supreme Court Ruling, maybe law enforcement will instead push for real-time access to GPS data from the carriers.
- cperciva 15y agoIt's very likely that you know someone who's vehicle is being tracked by the FBI this year. You're assuming that the rate is evenly distributed. I think it's very likely that it isn't; if you're involved in espionage or organized crime, you probably know several people who were being tracked by the FBI. Based on your "more than 3256" people you know by name and the (bogus) equidistribution hypothesis, you should also know 1 or 2 victims of violent crime and about 10 victims of property crime each year, and at some point in your life you should know a homicide victim.
- mahmud 15y agoNY police is snooping on people "just" for being Muslim[1] (I put Muslim in quotes just in case you think that in and of itself supicious) So, you don't need to associate with the hypothetical drug barrons & foreign agents: you just need to know a Muslim. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/24/police-spying-new-york-muslim_n_1300379.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/24/police-spying-new-y...
- cperciva 15y agoTrue. And since one of your friends being Muslim is correlated with another of your friends being Muslim, this makes the distribution of number-of-friends-being-GPS-tracked even further away from Poisson.
- maratd 15y ago> NY police is snooping on people "just" for being Muslim And what would be your best guess as to why they did that?
- jc123 15y agoSounds reasonable and looks like 8-0 ruling http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf I wonder what the ruling would be for a case of a search of a trash can that is on the public street: seems it should be allowed without warrant.
- dedward 15y agoUnless we look at the privacy implications. Just because I Dont' want the paper anymore doesn't mean I'm putting it in the public domain..... or does it. If people find my junk useful, they can take it. but if there was some paperwork in there that I probably should have burnt or cross-cut-shred, should privacy laws not provide some kind of protection here? What if I realize the mistake before the truck comes but the feds have already taken my documents? It could be murky, and should be defined. And for the record, I want law enforcement to be able to effectively do their jobs, and for technology to help them, but something that used to be hard and expensive that is now cheap and easy ( gps trackers instead of following people manually) should never be an excuse to abandon the fundamental principles put in place to prevent the abuse of power.
- amirmc 15y ago"... something that used to be hard and expensive that is now cheap and easy ... " That seems to sum up all the problems I'm seeing now. It's become so easy/cheap to track people, that the cost of doing so doesn't have to figure as prominently in the decision.
- wtracy 15y agoIf you dropped paperwork into the trash without shredding it, I would be much more worried about an identity thief taking it than a federal agent. I'm as freaked out as the next person about the U.S. turning into a police state, but feds rummaging through trash bins out on the curb is fairly low on my list of worries.
- a_a_r_o_n 15y agoWhy? They're not searching it because it's randomly in the street, they're searching it because you are presumably interesting. If you're that interesting then there should be no problem getting a warrant. The privacy issue here is whether you have the right to avoid specific scrutiny by the government. I think the government should either have to make their case, or GTFO. That's the myth we learned in Civics class anyway. We don't let the government do things merely because they can.
- beedogs 15y ago> For instance, he said, agency is now “wrestling” with the legality of whether agents can lift up the lid of a trash can without committing trespass. Um, I thought it was pretty well-established that you cannot do this? Is the FBI just stupid?
- ars 15y agoI assume they are talking about garbage on the curb, where it is pretty well established that they can do this.
- pasbesoin 15y agoVery often, the parkway or land near curbside is public property and not personal property. You put your garbage cans there, you've "discarded" their contents. I believe the same applies to alleyways. (IANAL and I don't know the specific legal arguments.)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nkassis 15y agoYeah I've heard this but the trash can wasn't discarded, I could see how a trash bag alone maybe since all of it is going to the trash but an actual trash can with a closed lid? What is the rule around mailbox? Would opening the mailbox door be considered trans-passing? Wouldn't that apply the same to a trash can?
- pasbesoin 15y agoThe mailbox is/becomes USPS (U.S. Postal Service) domain (I don't know about "property"). Which is why you'll never find handbills placed in them -- it's against the law, and the postal service will fine and/or prosecute companies that violate this. Again, I don't know all the arguments, but you can, for example, leave your bicycle on public property without losing your property rights to it. (For that matter, you can park your car on a public street.) I believe the convention is that, when you've placed your trash for pickup, you've also discarded your property rights. Where the line is, though, for example with regard to "placement"? Any lawyers want to chime in? P.S. Or, I/we could wade through the other comments in this now much larger thread.
- orbitingpluto 15y agoThat's just so much effort to plant those things. Isn't that what Facebook and specially crafted SMS messages are for? Now they can save money and go up another order of magnitude in the amount they track! Would you be particularly concerned with wasting your time with low-tech lojacking when so many other avenues of surveillance are around the corner? Isn't it better to direct your efforts to be ahead of the curve?
- schme 15y agoSlightly off-topic, but the topic of the story made me think about GPS navigation devices. Not a big deal, but slightly annoying.
- newman314 15y agoWell if you have OnStar or a Tesla, remote tracking is possible. For Tesla, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3619088 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3619088
- slug 15y agoIf you carry a cell phone while on, remote tracking is possible too. It's even easier since usually the wireless signal is better than the multiple satellite signals that need to reach the gps under (or wherever they put it) the car and might even be more precise in city environments due to the closer spacing of cell towers. I find it odd that people are so concerned about this while they carry a tracking device with their person all or most of the time... EDIT: not only that, can be instructed as a real time listening device, if you are that paranoid :)
- newman314 15y agoI believe the context we were talking about was for GPS devices. I'm not disputing the use case of tracking via cell phone but that's a whole other ball of wax.
- joering2 15y agopolice/fbi was caught lying many times before. I dont think stop using GPSes is an option for them. Any idea from a layer standpoint what would happen if they still track a car with GPS and this is proven? can someone be liable or is it just going to be a slap on the wrist, some one-page document saying "kindly please stop because you were told to by supreme court" ? what kind of law works against FBI?
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoThe evidence gathered from the GPS and any evidence gathered as a result of that evidence would be thrown out of court. It becomes fruit of the poisoned tree[1]. I think most police agencies would be very careful to not risk having all evidence gathered while the accused car is nearby thrown out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
- Drbble 15y agoIt is more likely that the police would press their luck against a suspect who does not know his rights and cannot afford lawyer. A high socioeconomic class suspect is less interesting to the FBI.
- joering2 15y agomost police work nowadays is mouse and cat play. I can foresee them still using those devices but just not using them as a proof in court. example. you put gps and track some narcotics dealer to a place where they exchange the stuff. you caught everyone. you go in front of the judge, he asks you: how did you know where to find them, do you tracked them by gps [just adding here i know this wont play this way], - no, judge, we just had anonymous tip coming through our hot line. make sense?
- gerggerg 15y agoIf they hadn't made this judgment, would there be anything stopping you or I from legally attaching GPS devices to government official's cars and recording their movements? They should overturn the ruling and make it fair game for anyone to track anyone else. Then we can make google maps mashups for tracking each other and government officials. --edit-- </sarcasm>
- Harkins 15y agoWhile it's a fun turn-the-tables idea, because government is so much bigger, with more power and resources, this would still be incredibly unequal. You might be able to track a dozen government officials; the FBI could track every member of a political minority group (eg. the persecution of MLK).
- pak 15y agoI'm interested in how > a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements, even if those movements are in public. translates to actions on the public internet. This has potentially huge ramifications if it were to apply to the web, where the "totality of one's movements" can be much easier to track and perhaps even more revealing than where my car goes. Can the FBI, by this standard, potentially need a search warrant to: 1. attempt to create a complete profile of my semi-public internet content (surreptitiously friend me on Facebook, follow my Twitter feed, and monitor all other sites where I am active for recent posts) 2. look at the browsing history of a public terminal I regularly use at a library 3. capture packets I'm sending over unencrypted WiFi in my home None of these things are very much private nor does any involve any trespass by an investigator--perhaps 3 carries the greatest expectation of privacy by the average technically uninclined citizen. A lawyer could argue, however, that in capturing one or more of them, the FBI approaches capturing nearly all of what somebody does on the internet. I think the Supreme Court has done a very interesting (and perhaps unprecedented?) thing here in creating an expectation of privacy in a public environment by invoking the work totality. With cameras getting smaller, and networks wider, and databases larger, it only seemed inevitable that within a few decades, all of our public movements within urban centres could and likely would be recorded. Similarly, people are already to starting to consider the internet to be "forever," since content never seems to be really "deletable," and Google/Facebook increasingly lower the effort needed to profile somebody's web content. Tell me that in a few decades, our movements on the internet will not be as important as our movements in the physical world, if that isn't already the case. I hope this decision is the seed of a legal philosophy that could impede the continued erosion of privacy-in-public by everyone's smaller chips and bigger hard drives. In my mind, the freedom for people to interact in public without fear of lifelong ramifications is vital to democracy and societal progress although less and less people seem to agree with me. So, maybe this is my desperate optimism talking.
- kirillzubovsky 15y agoI think the point SC is trying to make is that while you're in public, FBI is free to follow you around all day long, thus tracking you in a way that you made publicly available. However, bugging your car isn't something that you made explicitly available and therefore is violating your reasonable expectations of privacy. That said, this indeed makes it very interesting in online play. It's obvious that FBI shouldn't just hack into your computer and watch your every move. But, if they just happened to observe your unencrypted data bits and make sense out of them, that might still be legal. After all, that's just like watching where your car goes to every day.
- edj 15y agoThis is one of those rare instances lately when news about the actions of the federal government are positive and encouraging.