Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars | Hacker News Reader

Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars

cnn.com

6 pointssheats11 comments

Makes sense to me. If sticking a GPS transmitter on your car violates a fundamental right to privacy, surreptitiously following your car with a combination of cars, closed-circuit cameras, helicopters, and whatever-the-hell else they use must violate that same right. Yet clearly the police can surveille whoever they want without a warrant.

This is based on the assumption that the car is only ever used on public roads. It's usually a safe assumption, but data is still being transmitted from private property whenever the car is parked.

But your private property isn't necessarily protected. For example, police don't need a warrant to fly a helicopter 50 feet above your fenced in back yard while they're searching for marijuana plants. The court says they're in the common airspace and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the common airspace.

Similarly, if your car is sitting in the driveway you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your car--everyone can see it; everyone knows where it is. Presumably the police could not sneak into your locked garage and plant a tracker. Presumably.

The jurisprudence gets a bit tricky when you start talking about what's inside your house. See-through-wall heat guns, for example, are not allowed without a warrant because the home is the paramount protected place under the 4th Amendment.

Unless you have an actual batcave, comparable data is being transmitted without the GPS transmitter in the form of photons.

I think this is a good indication that the right to privacy is obsolete. If an investigator can hear a conversation you're having in your house using amplification technology, who needs a warrant?

The whole point of the right to privacy, as I understand it, is protection against over-zealous police forces enforcing unjust laws. If you're doing something in private, and it doesn't affect anyone, you should be allowed to do it, regardless of the law.

We need a right to anonymous private activity, regardless of where or how it takes place.

Actually, the right to privacy has nothing to do with whether a law is just or unjust. I think we'll see an element of that creep into the law as they very concept of privacy erodes. But the basic idea behind privacy in the Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure context is that police ought to be subject to oversight (by the courts) so that they don't become a menace.

Incidentally, the problem with search-and-seizure jurisprudence is that every time the Supreme Court hears a case on the subject the defendant IS guilty--the debate is over whether the evidence of guilt is admissible in court. That makes it hard for the Court to turn a blind eye so they tend to expand the law in favor of the police every time they get a new case. The alternative is to free a known criminal. It takes guts to hold police to a principle when the immediate result is to free a criminal.

This is exactly what I mean when I say the right to privacy is obsolete - by itself, it's no longer capable of protecting the freedoms it was originally intended to preserve. We need something better.

What right to privacy? Privacy is a very simple word. It occurs nowhere in the Constitution.

It may appear nowhere in the constitution, but that doesn't mean it isn't constitutionally protected.

The substantive due process protections of the 14th Amendment extend heightened protection to a number of rights. Privacy is one of them. Marriage is another. There are plenty more.

In addition the 4th Amendment has its own privacy implications.

GPS tracking is the tip of the iceberg. I bet we're not 10 years away from the cops being able to put an all in one video-audio-gps-wifi snooper the size of an ipod-nano on you, your car, house, boat, whatever. And given how fast hardware commoditizes, the device will probably cost under $500. If these hypothetical devices become equipped to tweet, then everybody is fucked. It sure gives me confidence that our law enforcement worker-bees are amongst the most trustworthy, noble and incorruptible Americans out there! In many countries, everybody implicitly understands the police are corrupt, and basically operate like the biggest, legal gang themselves. /sarcasm

Thanks a lot technologically myopic courts for setting such a dangerous legal precedent!

On the bright side, isn't it trivial and relatively cheap to make a radio detector of GPS and other such radio transmissions? Or even a signal jammer? Like what the spies use to sweep a room for listening devices? Let's just assume you're cool with temporarily violating FCC broadcast regulations within a small personal vicinity. ;)

Unintended consequences are my favorite however. Perhaps, if we're lucky, this situation might just invert, and if total surveillance becomes dirt cheap, then it also means we can watch the watchers. Imagine a Facebook for watching every LE agent in real time across the entire country. Sounds laughable, but technology changes fast! (I bet certain global crime cartels already have something like this, in crude beta—all it takes is one mole and you've got the right data to connect the dots.)

GPS jammers can be had for pretty cheap, but I believe they're illegal. Tinfoil works pretty well too.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, this situation might just invert, and if total surveillance becomes dirt cheap, then it also means we can watch the watchers. Imagine a Facebook for watching every LE agent in real time across the entire country.

The devices for this are already pretty cheap as well (zoombak I believe?), probably illegal to track a LEO as well though.

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