Click pic to see more pics and read about the equipment
We citizens are too dangerous to be allowed to roam free without supervision. Who knows who might be carrying a loaded dangerous thought.
The use of GPS tracking devices is poised to become one of the most contentious privacy issues before the Supreme Court, if it agrees to hear an appeal filed by the Obama administration last month. The administration is seeking to overturn a ruling by a lower court that law enforcement officials must obtain a warrant before using a tracker.
The constitutional matter until now has been left to district courts around the country to decide, resulting in a patchwork of conflicting rulings. Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit filed in March by an Arab-American college student named Yasir Afifi alleges that the FBI violated his privacy rights by placing a GPS device on his car without a warrant, and that the bureau targeted him simply because of his ethnic background.
[…]
When Thomas found the device on her vehicle back in 2005, she ripped it from the underside of her fender, but quickly grew fearful the FBI would raid her house if agents suspected she’d removed it. So she carried it in a duffel bag in her trunk for a week, while she and her boyfriend considered what to do.When her lawyer called a local U.S. attorney to inquire about the device, the prosecutor acknowledged it belonged to the feds and said they wanted it back. But Thomas refused to hand it over, and the FBI seemed to drop the matter. Her attorney told Threat Level the government “basically abandoned it.”
Sure, I want bad people caught. But since the government sees to think we all are potentially bad people…
Wouldn’t just be cheaper to have everyone “win” a free iPhone via the mail?
And there was this story where the FBI demanded the device be returned.
http://wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/
Looking at these stories, I wonder what would happen if somebody who found this on their car, placed it on a government vehicle. Maybe not Gitmo or Supermax, but a Federal penitentiary I’m sure.
Like I have said many times.
This Obama administration is worse than Bush.
Example: “The use of GPS tracking devices is poised to become one of the most contentious privacy issues before the Supreme Court, if it agrees to hear an appeal filed by the Obama administration last month. The administration is seeking to overturn a ruling by a lower court that law enforcement officials must obtain a warrant before using a tracker.”
For shear Kafka-esque the Brits have you beat. In the 60s the Communist Party of Great Britain (totally legal over there because they are a monarchy without a bill of rights) found a bug in their headquarters.
Thinking it was the secret service spying on them they smashed it.
Although the government didn’t admit to placing it – in those days the government didn’t admit to the existence of the secret service.
They were successfully prosecuted for destroying government property – on the basis that they believed it was government property when they destroyed it!
If you find one under your car:
Step 1.
Drive to the nearest railroad crossing and remove the device. “It must have fallen off when I drove over the railroad tracks.”
Step 2
Place it on a passing railroad car.
Step 3
Go home and deny everything.
If u find one on your car.
Go to the local donut shop.
Look for a police car.
Install on bumper.
Package it up and mail it to a false address in Washington DC. That way it will end up in the “dead letter office”. There are millions of packages there; it would drive the FBI nuts trying to find it.
Put an intermittent power relay in it to come on for 1 minute every other day. Then put it on a train or an 18-wheeler or a police car or …
Like most modern tech, these are getting cheaper all the time. How long until every vehicle sold must have a government-issued tracker? How long after that until everyone must have a government-issued ID card with a tracker in it?
It’s because of this possibility that I think a warrant should be necessary.
Few people truly understand the power of Moore’s Law. Since Kilby and Noyce invented the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of devices it is possible to etch onto a single chip has increased between 10 billion and 1 trillion times, for about the same cost per unit. Since the development of the hard drive, capacities have increased faster than Moore’s Law. It won’t be long before it’s cheaper to track every living person and keep a permanent record of their location (and possibly an audio record as well) for their entire lives than is spent on issuing drivers’ licenses today.
Without strong protections, all this data will be available to every prosecutor, whether Federal, State, County, Municipal or District, no matter how ambitious or religiously fundamentalist.
I’m not much into conspiracy theories and I don’t see Big Brother lurking behind every rock, but this trend, combined with the Patriot Act and the existence of a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security concerns me.
I don’t understand why the Feds even bother when they can track just about everyone through their cell phones.
Uncle Patso said,
Don’t laugh to quick most tyres coming out have tracking devises in them, like the ones in stores on cloths etc, all they have to do is put a receiver on main roads it will tell them who went past what time etc