Ninth Court of Appeals legalizes warrantless GPS tracking

Overheal · 27-08-2010 12:47AM #1

http://gizmodo.com/5622800/our-worst-nightmares-about-the-government-tracking-us-just-came-true

It's okay for the government to plant a GPS tracker on the car parked in your driveway, tracking everywhere you go. It doesn't violate your rights, at all—according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California, Arizona, Oregon and a bunch of the western US, has ruled that the government did nothing wrong when the DEA planted a GPS tracking device on Juan Pineda-Moreno's Jeep, which was parked in his driveway—without a search warrant. The underpinning for the ruling is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in your driveway—unless you're loaded and it's kept safe, hidden from the outside world by gates or other security measures—and you have no reasonable expectation not to be tracked by the government.
It's the worst of all possible outcomes, our darkest nightmares about the increasingly mindful technology we put in our pockets come true—that technology being blithely turned against us by our government in a move that only be described as Orwellian, even if that goes the writerly instinct to avoid cliches. Because it's not so much cliche as it is fact. That decision says it's okay for the government to track our movements, everywhere we go, without so much as a scratched slip of paper, eliding all of the protections that are supposedly in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
The 'slippery slope' is typically deployed as a trope to argue against men marrying men sliding into a world where dudes do dogs, but if you squint, it's not so hard to see how if it's okay for the government to plant a GPS tracker on your vehicle in the night, without a warrant, it could progress to suddenly being okay to flip the switch on your phone, tracking everywhere it went—after all, if Google can know where you're at, why can't the government?
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals is the same court that ruled it was okay to search the contents of laptops without even a reasonable suspicion that you're doing something illegal, arguing they're just like any other dumb piece of luggage. Together these two rulings—along with every other boneheaded government utterance about technology, from copyright to broadband regulation—highlight how desperately we need smarter, more considerate laws, rules and regulations when it comes to how the government can use technology for and against the people.
Otherwise we're screwed.

I have a copy of 1984 around here somewhere, and I've really been meaning to get around to it.

No conspiracy here: It's only a matter of time before gov't satellites will retina scan you the moment you step outside, and they will have all the computing power they need to track and profile every person in the country, eventually on the planet.

metrovelvet · 27-08-2010 01:04AM

Overheal wrote: »

http://gizmodo.com/5622800/our-worst-nightmares-about-the-government-tracking-us-just-came-true

I have a copy of 1984 around here somewhere, and I've really been meaning to get around to it.

No conspiracy here: It's only a matter of time before gov't satellites will retina scan you the moment you step outside, and they will have all the computing power they need to track and profile every person in the country, eventually on the planet.

They already have all of that info on us.

27-08-2010 02:52AM

Time to hack and install misinformation. What fun!

**Blue poses in front of mirror, trying on her new black hat**

amacachi · 27-08-2010 02:57AM

What height gates must one have to make it illegal for them to do it? Or how hard should a lock be to break? Disgusting ruling.

demonspawn · 27-08-2010 03:17AM

Blue_Lagoon wrote: »

**Blue poses in front of mirror, trying on her new black hat**

*Demon poses in front of the mirror, trying on his new tin-foil hat*

Try and read my mind now suckers!!

On a more serious note, I'm not at all surprised to hear this. I had always assumed they've been doing this kind of crap for years, but nooo....I was just some CT nut with an overactive imagination!

Edit: I feel sorry for the poor unfortunate that tries going onto the wrong dude's property and catches a bullet in the noggin. Of course SWAT, the ATF, and the FBI will be there soon and it won't end well at all.

Manic Moran · 27-08-2010 03:36AM

Well, is the 9th actually wrong in its reading of the law?

When you're in public, is there any prohibition on anyone from the government knowing where you are? What's the difference between a GPS tracker and a tail of a few unmarked vehicles or an aircraft with a video camera? It's just an issue of technology, not principle.

NTM

Overheal · 27-08-2010 03:56AM

Well, one has been attached to your property, and the other is passive observation.

I view the GPS tracker as an unauthorized Modification to my vehicle. This means any private citizen can do the same thing? "Installing" Bumper stickers on your neighbors car because he supports another party.

27-08-2010 05:17AM

Manic Moran wrote: »

When you're in public, is there any prohibition on anyone from the government knowing where you are? What's the difference between a GPS tracker and a tail of a few unmarked vehicles or an aircraft with a video camera? It's just an issue of technology, not principle.

Do you trust all government officials that may have access to this advancing technology? I don't.

And it's more than an issue of advancing technology. Before they had limited human resources and budget to follow a citizen about. The allocation of scarce HR and budget was highly subject to oversight because it was limited. Now technology will allow them to follow everyone with GPS satellites and computers, more efficiently, effectively, with lower costs and fewer human resources. Of course, we all know there are no pervs or sickos or stalkers that work for the government...

You might want to see the Scottish crime drama film RED ROAD, about how comprehensive neighborhood street cam surveillance can be abused by a government official to wrongfully pursue her own personal agenda. That may be fiction, but I would suspect that out of the thousands of government officials that have access, there maybe be a few that also pursue their own personal agendas not described in their job descriptions. What was one of the conditions that increases the likelihood of crime? Access?

Do you really think that the GPS can only be read by government? A tech-savy stalker can track you too. Anything programmed can be cracked by hackers.

Do you remember the school that put RFID chips in Northern California children ID cards to improve security? A hacker could sit in the parking lot, intercept the signals, and access all the ID information on the chips. When the smart parents found out, they protested and the chips were removed.

There was a time when you could conveniently turn off the GPS in mobile phones, now it's very difficult for the average user. Parents already have inexpensive user-friendly software on their laptops to track their children's mobiles. What's to keep a computer-savy sicko from stalking your mobile, or worse, your defenseless g/f, wife, or child's mobile?

What happened to bloody rights to privacy? Does everyone want a total surveillance society? What's next? A national ID card with a tracking chip? You will defend your right to bear arms, but not privacy?

How about LESS government, rather than more?

Maybe it's time to write a fictional screenplay about a new action hero, Capt Cyber-Nemo and her DDOS government attack machine! But instead of attacking government file servers with spam from her offshore cloud botnet, she fills their data banks with useless and random misinformation about all citizens.

Ninth Court of Appeals legalizes warrantless GPS tracking

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