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FBI caught surveiling American citizen, demand tracking device back.
Witch_Hunter_84
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Well it seems that the FBI got caught red-handed [URL="Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/#ixzz11kSz5Rrc"]spying on a U.S. Arab-American citizen[/URL].
After he identified the device by posting pictures of it on the internet with the question "what is this", it was identified as a tracking device made by a company that sells such devices exclusively to law enforcement. He was later confronted outside his house by FBI agents and police officers, questioned, and was asked for the device back. I say 'asked for' in only the loosest terms because they also added "We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate" (It is expensive).
Apperently attatching the device is legal though.
Now I'm not too sure on the exact legalities of this situation, but isn't there some sort of probable cause that the FBI needs to establish before just throwing a GPS device into someone's car, violating their civil liberties somewhat to do so? Or is the suspect here just brown enough for the FBI to go "National Security" and everything's justified? I'm kind of leaning towards violation of civil liberties here, but the subject is just so murky nowadays it's almost impossible to be sure. Hella embarrassing for the FBI I must say if their tracking equipment can be found while getting your brakes checked.
Afifi, a business marketing student at Mission College in Santa Clara, discovered the device last Sunday when he took his car to a local garage for an oil change. When a mechanic at Ali’s Auto Care raised his Ford Lincoln LS on hydraulic lifts, Afifi saw a wire sticking out near the right rear wheel and exhaust. Garage owner Mazher Khan confirmed for Wired.com that he also saw it. A closer inspection showed it connected to a battery pack and transmitter, which were attached to the car with a magnet. Khan asked Afifi if he wanted the device removed and when Afifi said yes, Khan pulled it easily from the car’s chassis.
After he identified the device by posting pictures of it on the internet with the question "what is this", it was identified as a tracking device made by a company that sells such devices exclusively to law enforcement. He was later confronted outside his house by FBI agents and police officers, questioned, and was asked for the device back. I say 'asked for' in only the loosest terms because they also added "We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate" (It is expensive).
Apperently attatching the device is legal though.
in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it’s legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect’s car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.
Now I'm not too sure on the exact legalities of this situation, but isn't there some sort of probable cause that the FBI needs to establish before just throwing a GPS device into someone's car, violating their civil liberties somewhat to do so? Or is the suspect here just brown enough for the FBI to go "National Security" and everything's justified? I'm kind of leaning towards violation of civil liberties here, but the subject is just so murky nowadays it's almost impossible to be sure. Hella embarrassing for the FBI I must say if their tracking equipment can be found while getting your brakes checked.
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten in your presence.
Witch_Hunter_84 on
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If they had a significant case then they could have gotten a warrant. There is absolutely no reason to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt here.
As far as I understand, this is currently a legal grey area: the justification for this sort of monitoring is that the places you drive are all public and that hence you have no expectation of privacy vis a vie tracking where your car goes. But I think I remember reading something in the times about how this rationale was not yet firmly established either way, and was going to be on the SCOTUS docket soon (or something to that effect).
Wasn't there some very grey-area case where a car was out on the open in front of the garage, but on private property that got a tracker on it? (As in someone got caught placing the tracker while the car was on private property.)
I mean, how is this any different than a cop doing a stakeout, and following the guy as he drives around town? You certainly dont need a warrant for that, as the dude is just driving around, you arent impeding on his privacy as the town is a public place. Aside from maybe a HUGE piece of private property, hes not going to go out of eyesight from the public roads (barring garages/parking etc).
This is basically a more efficient way of tracking using less manpower and more open to less hearsay.
However, if it turns out the FBI is still doing the whole, 'Herp Derp, related to a minority leader, better track him,' thing, then thats pretty messed up too.
On the other hand, tracking devices are pretty heavy things. Watching someone that long (a reddit comment said the batteries can last for weeks) is excessive, and theres realistically no time sensitivity to it, a warrant should be required. The problem is, where do you draw a line. A warrant for any GPS tracking? A warrant for just following the guy in general? Maybe if you follow him for X amount of time? What if you follow him for X-1 day?
The privacy rationale is something like: a complete record of a person's movements over a period of weeks or even months gives an extremely intimate portrait of their life, of the sort that's normally only available to a spouse or very close friend (if even that). I tend to agree with this line of thought. I think that you still enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy even in 'public' spaces: in particular, you still enjoy the expectation that the only people that might happen to be watching you are random strangers, and certainly that no one is systematically following you and cataloging your every move. At the least, you should be able to enjoy this reasonable expectation.
I prefer a concept of privacy more expansive than just "what literally occurs within the walls of your home." Even then we have recent rulings on new technology undermining that--police can thermally scan your home without your consent and if they see heat sources they can go on to raid you for growing pot. Really, I worry that new technology is eroding traditional privacy rights by making it possible to monitor people in ways that are technically 'public' (putting a GPS on their car, sitting outside their house with a thermal imager) but which nonetheless breach traditional and, more importantly, reasonable expectations.
That's kind of the problem, it makes it too easy. With a computer doing the tracking, they could track every single car and truck in the country, and once they can, it makes it harder to stop them from actually doing it. Just team up with those pols who want every car tracked so it can be given a mileage tax or something and there you go. And since people in the modern world are pretty much always within a kilometer of their car, if not just a few hundred feet, it's basically a way put trackers on people.
Uuuh, why would you believe that prolonged human surveillance without court order would be legal?
edit:
Huh? Scotus ruled the opposite.
Edit2: Edited a word in....
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Just a note--this is true for a great many people in the US, and particularly true for a lot of cities (including mine), but in many other cities public transport is common and people aren't necessarily anywhere near their vehicle.
I guess that is picking nits though, I can see what you mean, depending on the situation.
Well, shit, I guess I got my facts wrong.
:oops:
It was the one time Scalia got something right! Don't take it away from him!
Edit: meh, beaten.
Now think for a minute about how far people go from their cell phones. You don't need any extra devices to track those.
Right?
I remember reading about the case, but somehow I got it in my head that they ruled the opposite way.
The Data Retention Act in the EU wants to make it mandatory for phone companies to store location data, call/SMS information (sender/receiver number, timestamp, not actual content) for a minimum of six months.
edit: the specifics.
It seems to me that the law is purposefully grey in these circumstances probably because it affords law enforcement to bend civil liberties to almost a breaking point. It allows law enforcement to mildly exceed its athority legally because the law is vague, and if they succeed in nailing a bad guy with these methods it's championing justice, if they fail though it's an overreaching of their authority. Likewise I wonder if the justice department puts pressure on judges to keep the laws vague in these instances so they can run with this as long as humanbly possible?
Probably doesn't even matter he tried to sneak in a phrase for future use. With Stevens off the court the 4th amendment would be death before too long.
"We overreached our authority, but the law is grey in this area. We'll ensure that safeguards are put in place!"
As it usually goes.
Need? No. Phone companies can cooperate as a demonstration of good will.
Assuming they're not bolted on or something, I'd just stick it on the car next to me at the time. Should add some fun to the case when it turns out the FBI spent a few weeks tracking someone they didn't even mean to.
Here in Sweden they do tend to want a warrant for actual criminal investigations, since privacy and integrity is big here what with the Pirate Party and stuff.
They do go "oh shit, here you go" if the police asks for help when looking for a missing person though.
Let's all do the telecoms immunity dance!
rock out
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Well of course, that just reaks of terrorism.
Its different when the government is doing it to protect us.
I see we've reached the tin-foil hat-wearing crowd...
Your preference for what "reasonable expectation of privacy" should mean is not what it does mean. And the logic that "the only people that might happen to be watching you are random strangers" is, well... I guess calling it "logic" at all might be a bit of stretch.
Simply put, what you say or do in public is not private. That's why there are two separate words to identify each environment: "public" and "private," for those of you counting. I don't mean it to sound condescending, but I would genuinely urge you to take a look at the 4th Amednment, and then review your above contention; nowhere in the scenario outlined above is the privacy of your "person, house, papers or effects" infringed. I'm genuinely curious about your argument; I don't seem to hold with the general P.A. view that all cops are bad, while all individuals are good and could never being doing something that might warrant the interest of Law Enforcement.
It seems to me that your argument boils down to you being uncomfortable with the idea of surveillance as a technique by which Law Enforcement can investigate an individual. That puts you in a tough spot, because it is essentially the bottom-line use of man-hours for any investigatory agency, be it State, Local, or Federal.
As an aside, I urge you to read the aforementioned ruling in Kyllo v United States, as some of the ideas included might make you feel a bit more secure in your REP.
As CangoFett mentioned, the legal view of trackers in the abstract is that they are a substitute for the more-expensive man-hours of an officer/investigator. They generally do nothing more that what a Law Enforcement Official could do individually, and often do significantly less. The 9th Circuit ruling that trackers can be placed on vehicles even within the curtilage of a home, by the way, is not one that's been upheld in other circuits. Almost everywhere else in the nation, you'd need a warrant to place a tracker on a vehicle parked on private property.
I don't mean to scare you, Just_Bri_Thanks, but private companies do the same thing: fraud investigation departments for insurance companies come to mind, but the variety of industries that utilize surveillance in one form or another is pretty large. The difference between Law Enforcement and most of those private industries is that L.E. is generally aiming to prevent/deter/solve criminal activity, while those other organizations -- again, with the notable exception of fraud investigation departments -- are often trying to profile a potential customer. There might be a qualitative difference in there, but it's not one I've thought out. I don't think any of them utilize trackers, but as trackers are only a substitute for human surveillance, I think the point is still valid.
Although in that particular case, I didn't mind; they went through a FISA court to obtain a warrant, and in any case we later learned that we weren't the targets of the investigation -- rather we were close enough to an ongoing investigation and someone associated with the subject of that investigation that the FBI became concerned that we may have started asking the wrong people about things we noticed. So they bugged the car to find out if we knew anything and were talking about it with anyone.
Oh, and they totally did ask for all of their equipment back.
So they secretly bugged you even though you weren't a suspect and no files had been charged against you?
That's... even worse.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You also have to figure he was being tailed at some point for them to know the tracker was removed. Unless it has some capability of knowing it was moved/detached.
He posted about it on the internet, trying to figure out what it was.
I always found the "attach it to something else" approach to be much funnier.
But probably just as likely to get me in trouble. If not moreso.
The next train of thought would be to mail it to the FBI, but I imagine it'd cost a pretty penny to do so, and getting a fairly heavy electronic device would probably be construed as a possible bomb and get me thrown in jail within a few hours of them getting it.
Personally, I'd drop it off in the middle of nowhere and tell them to find it themselves based on the sounds being made.
I'd run and call the bomb squad. Played too many FPS I suppose.
Edit:
Conversely. Holy shit, that thing is worth a lot of money on Ebay.
what the hell? Is this the 60 or something?
I can get a track-able GPS unit the size of a box of matches, what the hell is the rest of it?
A giant battery so they don't have to go replace it every 10 hours?