Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV

[G_j]

Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV
By Kim Zetter November 8, 2011

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1

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.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

..more..

[gateley]

1. That' fucking frightening. nt

[xchrom]

2. Recommend

[FirstLight]

3. why?

it's not like these people are dangerous, right? so they are doing this to just regular people?

for what purpose? I don't get it..should I get my :tinfoilhat:

[lutefisk]

5. There appears to be a reason for the interest in "Greg"- not that it makes it right...

"Greg’s surveillance appears to involve different circumstances. It most likely involves a criminal drug investigation centered around his cousin, a Mexican citizen who fled across the border to that country a year ago and may have been involved in the drug trade as a dealer.

“He took off. I think he was fleeing. I think he committed a crime,” Greg told Wired.com, asserting that he himself is not involved in drugs.

Greg says he bought the SUV from his cousin in June, paying cash for it to a family member. He examined the car at the time and found no tracking device on it. A month later, he drove his cousin’s wife to Tijuana. Greg says he remained in Mexico a couple of days before returning to the U.S."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1

[reggie the dog]

12. drug dealing hurts no one

it is a victimless crime, drug users get the drugs they want, dealers get the money they want, remember the vast majority of all "drugs" sold in the usa is just weed.

[msanthrope]

14. What a load of shit. Drug dealing absolutely destroys lives, neighborhoods, and families.

And don't feed me the bullshit line that if it were legal, no negative effects would happen--the gangs and the cartels would still fight over territory, using innocent people and their homes as pawns.

[reggie the dog]

16. why would gangs and cartels fight over territory?

how many fights do you see over territory between carona and miller? seriously? why would they use innocent people and homes as pawns when it would be cheaper to stock their kilos of legal heroin in a warehouse by the port or airport?

drug dealing only destroys lives, neighborhoods, and families due to illegality, otherwise you would just have businesses like any other, selling people goods they want. People selling alcohol or tobacco do not destroy lives, neighborhoods, or familys, some peoples alcohol and tobacco abuse destroys their own lives, or families but that is their choice to use so much alcohol and the same goes for drugs too. dont blame the dealer for a lack of self control, if you have money and have to choose between food for yourself and your kid and drugs and you choose drugs you have a problem and it is your fault, not the dealers. the dealer is just someone who sells you what you want, they dont make you take anything. i walk past rows and rows of alcohol every time i shop for groceries and i am not tempted to buy any. i havent had a drop in over ten years and i imagine most people would do the same if they walked past legal heroin at the pharmacy.

[SomethingFishy]

22. Yeah! Just like the moonshiners fought over

territory after Prohibition was struck down... :eyes: It'll be an all out WAR! Pandemonium! Chaos! Insanity!

Yeah we should keep drugs illegal. It's working so fucking well. :eyes:

[NashVegas]

46. So Instead Of Letting Thugs Fight Over It, We'll Let Pfizer and Eli Lily & All Their Stockholders

push drugs.

That's what's going on right now with prescription drug abuse. Let's just throw a little coke and skunk weed into the mix.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

25. Clue bus just pulled into the station. Grab a chair.

If weed was legal in this country, why on earth would would cartels want to traffic in a substance that no longer even pays for the gas to get to the grow site? Supply and demand.

[RainDog]

28. the reason illegal drug cartels resort to violence is that they have no recourse

in courts of law.

when an entity can use the courts of law to settle disputes, that's what legal businesses do. of course there are some criminals in any business - but if they resort to violence, they are arrested and put on trial.

I do not disagree with you that prohibition creates a climate that destroys lives, neighborhoods and families. It's "drug dealing" instead of a business because it's illegal.

Since we already have an example of this move from criminal to legal enterprise with alcohol, I don't understand why you think other forms of this sort of activity are different. Obviously there are tons of differences between meth and cannabis, or cannabis and cocaine (the drug of choice on Wall Street), but the majority of arrests and majority of uses of any substance is cannabis.

If the U.S. removed cannabis from the realm of illegal substances, they would remove its proximity to other substances. This is, again, also the case with alcohol sales.

What makes this situation and time so different?

[bigmonkey]

30. I think there's a lot of empirical evidence that prohibition is counter-productive.

To be fair, you have to count not only lives lost to drug addiction, but lives lost to drug prosecution.

[reggie the dog]

41. lives lost to drug addiction are not the fault of the dealers

they are the fault of the user, before i started growing my own i used to buy weed, the person selling it to me was not making me buy it, i was buying it because i wanted it. i choose to use drugs knowing the risk.

[Xicano]

34. That's odd, I don't seem to recall 7-11 stores doing drive by shootings on the local supermarkets

for selling booze in the same neighborhood. Does that sort of thing happen where you live?

[montanto]

17. and yet people do get killed over weed.

I know victims of this victimless crime. Even here in L.A. where the price of a case of beer will get you legal access, people die over turf, in deals gone wrong, etc. I'm all about legalization, but saying there isn't any current damage done over buying/selling weed isn't helping the cause. One of the main arguments for legalization is to cut back on the violence stemming from its illegality.

[reggie the dog]

19. as you say, the violence comes from illegality

I dont think coors and miller workers/owners kill each other too often.... hell you can even sell coors legally east of texas now......because it was sold on the black market out east before like a drug with the associated violence back when coors was legal in texas but illegal to sell in arkansas but at least we got he movie smokey and the bandit out of it.....

[Sirveri]

24. Last I checked nobody was calling to legalize murder.

I'm not sure why people automatically assume that just because drugs would be legal, the potential negatives that people grant their usage would somehow become legal.

DUI is illegal, yet alcohol is not. Getting into a drunken brawl is illegal, yet getting drunk is not.

The issues of crime have little to do with the legal status of the drug, and much much more to do with poverty, the desire for escapism, and smuggling. Then again, two managers of a dominos pizza in FL were just busted for arson for burning down their competitors store.

[Matariki]

27. The CIA is the victim

when they don't get their cut.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. k&r

[Poll_Blind]

6. Wow- K&R. Worth reading and very chilling. nt

PB

[KurtNYC]

7. from the article is sounds like his phones are tapped also

Seems like the phone would be a better source of surveillance than a GPS device that uploads its location once an hour and doesn't know who is driving. The whole warrant issue aside, why bother with GPS?

[Tsiyu]

8. Funny, the Supremes heard arguments Tuesday

on whether or not warrants are required before GPS devices are placed on vehicles.


NPR's version: http://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warrants-for-gps-tracking-devices

snip


""The government's position is that any law enforcement officer, in his completely unfettered discretion, can choose to put this device on anyone's car and track what medical appointments you go to, what religious groups you meet with, what political activities you drive to. This is really an extraordinary undertaking and one where the critical protection would be that a neutral magistrate would approve in advance whether there is actually some probable cause to believe someone has committed a crime before you install a GPS device," he says.

Dellinger has a second argument, not addressed by the appeals court, but that is before the Supreme Court. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution bans not only unreasonable searches, but also seizures of a property. He argues that placing the GPS device on the exterior of Jones' car interfered with Jones' right to exclude others from using his car, and that planting the device constituted a trespass on Jones' property."

snip

"In recent years, the lower courts have split on the question.

In Washington, D.C., Judge Douglas Ginsburg, writing for a unanimous appeals court panel, said a warrant was required in the Jones case because of its intrusiveness. "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups."

The likelihood that police could conduct such a monthlong, 24/7 surveillance by just watching and following the suspect, he said, is "nil."

SNIP



The justices discussed all of the cameras in Britain, one saying it seemed "scary" to always be watched.
Scalia, during the discussion said "If it's scary, it must be unconstitutional" which I suppose was his idea of a joke?

[G_j]

9. Scalia.. funny guy

:banghead:

[reggie the dog]

10. back in 1999 i got busted at a roadblock in virginia and i could

have sworn i heard a cop say "did we get him" and another say "yeah i think so", but i got off due to illegal search and seizure anyways. while out on bail in illinois i noticed that there was a strange unopenalbe box about the size of a chalk board eraser stuck by a magnet to the bottom of my pickup truck, i threw it next to the road. when found innocent at my trial later a DEA agent who had come up from DC to my trial (for all of 45 grams)told me they were still watching me and gave me his card if i wanted to talk, which i didnt accept.

i must add that i was doind deep undercover for my sociology studies about the role that criminal gangs played in socializing urban male youth and that i was doing small time dealing buying cheap pounds of weed from them and reselling in the suburbs so who knows what the fuck happened)

[FarCenter]

11. Google GPS Tracker -- they are readily available to track kids, pets, cars, etc.

[denverbill]

13. He bought the truck from a Mexican drug dealer. Why is he surprised?

Frankly, considering his cousin could potentially be involved with one of the Mexican drug cartels, and he paid cash for Volvo SUV to a family member who had contact with his cousin, and he then visited Mexico, I can't say I'm all that surprised the DEA is interested in him.

[rhett o rick]

31. Isnt a warrant needed? nm

[bvar22]

15. Soon to be standard equipment on all new vehicles,

...as well as Cell Phones, and all other connected electronic devices,
if not already so.



But don't worry.
Big Brother really does love you.
Its for your own good,
and if you have nothing to hide,
you have nothing to worry about.

[Shagbark Hickory]

20. I was gonna say... I think it already is.

"OnStar, May I help you?"

[Defectata]

18. I propose a new stimulus package!

(1) Everyone inform on themselves to the FBI/DHS
(2) You will get a brand spanking new GPS device installed on your car
(3) Put that shit on eBay, and put $100 in your pocket!

[Poll_Blind]

21. Wow, just got a chance to finish off this article- K&R! Crazy shit!

PB

[sarcasmo]

23. If you think we still have rights in this country you are sadly mistaken.

[hunter]

26. Good thing he's here in the USA...

... 'cause anywhere else he might have had a hellfire missiles up his ass.

We have rights in America, don't you know! :patriot:

wikipedia



I think if the Federal government gave me one of these GPS tracking things I'd tie it to a high altitude weather balloon and let it go on a windy day.

"Holy crap!" they'd say. "Hunter has a flying car!!! Call the Air Force!"

[Octafish]

29. What police state are we in again?

We can't fly where we want...We can't drive where we want...We can't meet where we want...We can't think what we want...

[G_j]

37. it's for our own good

:patriot:

[backtoblue]

38. Don't question authority!!!

They know what's best!!!:spank:

[rhett o rick]

32. I am curious how the devices were attached. There isnt much metal that is accessible, I dont think.

[Rex]

33. Just doing what Hoover would have wanted them to.

One day adults will come along and respect the law, by not breaking it. Why not just do away with warrants altogether? Fuck freedoms, Hoover hated them!

[The Doctor.]

35. Swap them with another car.

Stick it on your neighbor's car for a while, then put it back on your own.

These fascists are pretty easy to fuck with when they over-reach.

[Xithras]

42. No, no, no.

Truck stop :)

Personally, I'd just drop it in my trash can, right before I empty the leftovers from my fridge. What are they gonna do?

[The Doctor.]

47. Okay, that's WAY better!

Thanks!

[NYC_SKP]

36. Look. If You're Not Doing Anything Wrong, Then You've Got Nothing To Worry About, Right???

:sarcasm:

That's what we're told about Internet surveillance, roadside checks, and other invasions of privacy, right?

:patriot:

[garybeck]

39. "The Obama administration will be defending the warrantless use of such trackers"

:puke:

which side are they on?

[truebrit71]

44. You really have to ask?

...How ironic that a former Constitutional Scholar won't defend the very thing he is supposedly an expert on..

"The administration...argues that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public"....Say what??? Because we can't teleport ourselves to our destinations the fuzz has the right to track us...What fucking country is this??

[SammyWinstonJack]

45. Which side are they on? Not ours, the 99% aka the 'lesser' people.

Love ya Obama. :silly:

[garybeck]

40. They should offer a device that will detect such devices on your vehicle.

That would make them go away pretty quick.

[Xithras]

43. They do. It's called a compass.

Real magnetic compasses, not the electronic kind built into your iPhone. Take a walk around you car. If the needle flickers and suddenly decides that your car is the north pole, you've found a magnetic source.

These things are fairly easy to find, but they're betting that nobody will look.

[garybeck]

48. I'll have to try that.

I take it from your post that if I put my phone into track mode, it will function just like one of those CIA/FBI trackers and I should be able to see that on a compass?

[uponit7771]

49. +1