Police Are Using Phone Tracking As A Routine Tool | Hacker News Reader

Police Are Using Phone Tracking As A Routine Tool

nytimes.com

...law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits.

That's just what I was thinking last time I held up the local liquor store. Who knew I had so much in common with the police!

It's rare that you can have all the problems with something so well summed up in a single statement, but there it is ; all the problems with law enforcement agencies summed up in one statement.

"All the problems with law enforcement agencies". I think this comment sounds wittier than it actually is. Policing is a dangerous and often unrewarding job and even the worst cops spend most of their time dealing with toxic situations we rarely even imagine.

I'm a civil libertarian, but I've found that I'm saner and my perspective much improved by remembering that the police are not an evil entity out to destroy us all, but rather a typically clumsy and inept collection of human beings trying to perform a vital task for society.

Seeing the police this way lets you pick out the difference between, for instance, false-alerting drug dogs used to effect civil asset forfeitures on interstate highways from situations like "active investigations aided by cell tower locations".

Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignorance is indistinguishable from malice."

The rather "Up With People" connotations conveyed by Hanlon's Razor (i.e. "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may be preferable to the more cynical tone of my chosen phrasing when dealing with inconsequential events. However, when effectively malicious incompetence and lack of foresight occur within societal institutions capable of sufficient influence, a perceived lack of malicious intent should not distract those affected by the offending institution from aggressively rooting out the sources of the incompetence.

I would also like to make a subtle point regarding the way in which you seem to have associated the phrase "the police" with a collection of instances of "police(wo)man". As suggested by my previous paragraph, I think it is worth distinguishing between "the police" as a societal institution capable of profoundly affecting those within its sphere of influence and those individuals from which it is composed.

In particular, it seems that attributing systemic problems to the individuals through whom they are expressed leads to a pair of difficulties. The first difficulty is that which you encountered, in which one hesitates to apportion any blame due to the perception that any assigned blame would correspond to an attribution of evil/malicious intent to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. The second difficulty is that pursuing solutions to a systemic capacity for sustained malicious ignorance/incompetence/ineptitude through actions targeted at the individuals through whom this capacity is expressed offers a potent example of the potential futility of treating symptoms rather than causes.

Note that my view converges with (my interpretation of) yours in the sense that I consider it important to avoid unnecessarily shifting blame earned by an institution onto its constituents, as this is unlikely to ameliorate systemic problems while generally producing negative consequences for those onto whom blame is shifted.

What you're saying here, I think, is that it's not fair to, in order to build support for policy, cast about for sympathy for the specific police officers who, for instance, get shot in the line of duty.

That's not what I'm doing.

I'm saying that adversarial encounters with the police are in the general case far more likely to involve actual criminals than they do law-abiding people being oppressed by malicious or busybody government entities.

I'm not saying that in order to advocate for a specific policy. I support increased oversight of the police. What I'm doing is objecting to sentences like "this sums up the whole problem with law enforcement". That wording clouds the issue. It makes it hard to distinguish between legitimate policing interests and illegitimate ones.

Worth noting: the FBI's GPS case turned on the fact that a person's vehicle is an "effect" in the sense of the people's right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The word "effect"; it's right there in the 4th Amendment.

The court did not find that people have a reasonable expectation to privacy in public spaces (an argument made by the defense in that case). If you're out and about in public, your location isn't private. This is obvious, because it's clearly lawful for the police to simply follow you around in public.

(I'm happy if the police end up universally needing [easily obtained] court orders to collect cell tower logs, but unlike most of HN, I don't see the status quo as particularly outrageous).

If you're out and about in public, your location isn't private. This is obvious, because it's clearly lawful for the police to simply follow you around in public.

This isn't obvious to me at all. I think you're falling into a trap peculiar to computer security in particular, generalizing from binary distinctions of "secure" vs "insecure", or "anonymous" vs "authenticated" as if these things were matters of Boolean logic, rather than of probabilities and degrees, in arenas outside of the easily automated.

If you're being followed around in public, that is by itself obvious; it normally affects your behaviour, it's stressful, and in fact prisons (Panopticon) have been designed around the idea of being under constant surveillance. The specific and explicit goal of such was "obtaining power of mind over mind"; if you don't think those who literally seek power do not have similar motives, you're naive.

The cost of following someone around means that it will only be applied in cases where police value it highly; presumably, incentives up the chain of command are aligned such that that level of investment is only made when the public interest is high; similarly, the levels of manpower will mean that conspiracy and persecution would be hard to hide.

When the effect of following someone around - knowing where they are at all times - is automated and based on cheap technology - indeed, technology whose cost is largely borne by those being followed, for phones - then the bar for following is much lowered. Far more trivial cases can have this level of intrusiveness applied to them; the public interest may not be so well served. Furthermore, without appropriate controls, persecution by individuals is enabled, without any need for a group conspiracy. For example, ex-husbands with access may spy on the location of their ex-wives and further their own corrupt, human goals.

I'm not generalizing; I'm restating the opinion in the FBI GPS case.

But your logic doesn't work anyways. If it did, we wouldn't need "stalking" laws. In stalking cases, defendants are guilty if the state (in this case, Connecticut) can prove (1) intent to to cause fear for their physical safety, (2) purposeful following not undertaken for lawful purposes, (3) willfulness, (4) repetition, and (5) that the victim actually ended up fearing for their safety. (That's paraphrased from CT model jury instructions).

Think about all the private following, observation, and even spying that this doesn't cover.

I think the specifics of the FBI GPS case result is wrong. I'm also uninterested in laws re stalking. I don't think your rebuttal has anything to do with my argument.

I'm talking about the philosophical matter of generalizing from specific cases of monitoring to mass surveillance, arguing that a justification for the former is not a justification for the latter, because the two are different in substance, not just quantity.

Case results follow from interpretation of laws; laws follow from philosophical principles. I'm arguing the philosophical principles. I don't accept counterarguments in the form of citations of specific laws, or interpretation of those laws, as valid.

I don't accept counterarguments in the form of citations of specific laws, or interpretation of those laws, as valid.

That sounds like a super fun debate to have, but, pass.

Here's an interesting essay on precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about - and it explains why binary thinking on this matter is a bad way to go about it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-ph...

Whether you know you are being followed or not is not the issue, it's been long-established that if you are out and about in public you do not have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy because plainly anybody can see where you are and where you go and who you meet.

When "lets spend the resources to track this suspect" becomes "lets look at the universal tracking logs to see if we can drum up some criminals to suspect" because technology made tracking free, you have a problem.

I agree, but that's not what's happened here.

It wasn't but its the unintended consequence that should be at the top of the list to watch out for when considering how the law should deal with tracking. It seems disturbingly possible.

I agree we should watch out for it, but I don't agree that it's irrelevant that it's legitimately useful today. Again: I'd be happy with a court order requirement, but not outraged if there wasn't one.

Drug dogs. Let's deal with that problem first, OK? Because we appear to have outsourced the 4th Amendment to dogs. I have a dog. My dog's jurisprudential capabilities are highly suspect.

Thankfully the Justices are aware that this is an issue. The beginnings of the oral argument in US v. Jones are relevant. The Chief Justice in particular is quite conscious about the issue you describe.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcri...

The benefits of having an on-your-person radiolocation beacon are somewhat muted by the possibility of having the government use that same technology to undermine your Constitutionally protected privacy.

If there is anything that history can teach us, it's that law enforcement agencies will work hard to keep us from knowing that this is going on and they will fight to keep this tool because it makes it easier for them to do their job. Ask any cop and they will tell you that they often view our "rights" as a complete hinderance to their effectiveness.

One man's "civil rights and due process" is another man's "got off on a technicality."

What "Constitutionally protected privacy" would that be?

There's no enumerated right to privacy. There's a right to be free from "unreasonable" searches. But, if you actually read the key Supreme Court majority opinions establishing what "reasonable" means, you find that it concedes privacy in every case in which legitimate government interests are at stake.

So, a bit of a layman's guide to Constitutional Law:

The Constitution specifies that there are rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution (or the Bill of Rights) that are yours nonetheless. The SCOTUS has found that this includes "the right to privacy."

Here is the first link from a 2 second Google search that might prove enlightening on the general scope fo the issues involved: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof...

Here is another:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

Generally speaking, if the SCOTUS says it's the law, you can consider their decision to be nearly equivalent to a general incorporation into the Consitution since all courts below it are essentially BOUND to follow that decision if it's relevant. If SCOTUS says it's illegal, it's illegal.

And I would disagree with your characterization of what "key Supreme Court majority opinions" say. The reasonableness test is one that gets bandied about quite a bit. You're going to have to cite specific cases if you're going to make that claim.

Here is one that supports mine:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf

Ctrl-F "reasonable expectation of privacy"

The syllabus of this opinion, which I cited upthread, says that the court didn't have to consider "reasonable expectation of privacy" (like I said, Scalia's majority opinion turns on the fact that you can't tamper with someone's person effects, including their car, and claim not to be encumbered by the 4th Amendment). The opinion goes on to repeatedly affirm that drivers on public roads do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

For the Constitutionality of searches without warrants in exigent circumstances or in situations where searches have limited scope and support a legitimate interest of the state, how about GM Leasing v United States.

Also, Katz is a case that comes up a lot in SCOTUS opinions about "reasonable" search (we have Katz to thank for the fact that wiretaps require warrants). From the majority opinion:

What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9210492700696416...

Finally, Griswold is the case everyone cites with regards to a specific right to privacy. But if you look at cases that follow it, like Lawrence v. Texas, we again see words like "legitimate state interest" (Ctr-F for it).

My point here isn't that there's no Constitutional protection of privacy. I'm just saying that there's no enumerated right to privacy, and implying that privacy protections under the Constitutions are lesser protections compared to freedom of speech and religion, or the freedom to bear arms. Of the possible freedoms a Constitution could explicitly grant, "privacy" seems like one of the least tenable, given how often privacy comes into tension with law enforcement.

Read the whole case and consider these salient points:

-The cops did in fact get a warrant to place a GPS device on the subjects car, but did so outside the terms of the warrant.

-The argument that the actual installation and tracking didn't constitute a search was rejected.

The point I'm trying to make is that there are lots of congruent mechanisms that make this information available to third parties that aren't necessarily going to be encumbered by the need to install a "tracking device" on a subject vehicle. Lots of information is already collected in the normal and proper operation of things like cellphones (for E911 -or- Facebook). There is VERY little case-law on this specific subject but I think my point (which we were originally arguing) that there is a "reasonable expectation of privacy" is enshrined in law.

The fact that you are driving a car on a public road isn't necessarily private, but I think it would be reasonable to suggest that the exact movements of a person over a period of a year (for example), to include who they might be co-located with in a specific property, or other pertinent meta-data DOES constitute something we would reasonably expect to be private.

To your other point:

"What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection."

There are MANY MANY instances where personal data is exported and stored without the knowledge of an individual that create all sorts of legal minefields for you. For example, I might be fully aware that my car is not invisible and can be seen by people on my street. I might be completely unaware that my cellphone is regularly broadcasting my location to Verizon or ATT even when I'm not using it.

There is a HUGE gap in public understanding of the practical effects of this technology use and the repercussions of that use. This "reasonable expectation of privacy" bit is going to collide with technology in a big big way IMHO.

Doesn't every criminal who is followed by a surreptitious police tail then get to claim the same reasonable expectation that nobody should have known about his specific transit from a drug corner to the stash house?

Everybody wants privacy in every situation. The whole point of there being a notion of a "reasonable expectation" to it is that a line has to be drawn somewhere. Without it, there'd be no law enforcement at all.

Aren't you being a little disingenuous here?

The whole point of getting a warrant is to justify to a competent legal authority (judge) that the specific right (reasonable expectation of privacy) is outweighed by the states interest (upholding the law). NOBODY here is claiming that this right is absolute.

More to the point: if the cops had simply done their job and obtained the warrant, executed it properly, and stayed within the confines of that warrant, there is no case for the SCOTUS to hear.

We're talking about the margins of warrant requirements and the expectation to privacy. Nobody's being disingenuous. The territory here simply isn't clear.

Again: the FBI lost this case because they physically tampered with someone else's effects. They did not lose because SCOTUS determined that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements. Which is unsurprising, because SCOTUS has explicitly said people don't reasonably have that expectation.

So, no. Not being disingenuous. Again: under your reasoning, couldn't the drug dealer fall back on their reasonable expectation of not having someone tail them as they transited from the drug corner to the stash house? Because the police can obviously do that without a warrant.

And again, I go back to REASONABLE. Cops following the guy is fine. Reasonable.

But your argument falls apart if the cops can go to Verizon or AT&T and pull your cached GPS data without a warrant. I certainly feel like that would be an unreasonable search. I think most people would agree with me. I think that's where the law will ultimately take us too.

Is the line maybe at "real-time"? Maybe the concern is best expressed as, "we don't feel it's OK for the police to RETROACTIVELY pull information about our location history; perhaps it's not reasonable for us to feel private about standing on a street corner or driving down an interstate, but we certainly feel private about the totality of everywhere we've been for the past month".

Maybe we feel it's more reasonable for the police to tail us because they're collecting the information actively and in real-time.

Or maybe we feel like its reasonable because there is less chance that something we did in the past might be made illegal (and therefore prosecutable) in the future.

Here is where I tend to disagree with strict constructionists: the framers were particularly aware that future situations might call for adjustments to the Constitution. It was far more important to generally provide a set of principles that could be adopted by a society and then adjusted as their reality evolved.

There is no way that the Framers could have foreseen wall-penetrating radar systems or GPS-enabled cellphones. Our justice system had a hard enough time coming to grips with the telephone and what that meant for Fourth Amendment protections. Since the Right to Privacy isn't enumerated but rather implied by the other Rights, we are probably going to see more cases similar in context U.S. v. Jones where the technical capability to track someone exists that doesn't involve an actual trespass by law-enforcement.

Ok, I follow you. But if the thing that bites us about cell tower logs is the retroactive character of it, what about other technologies that make it easier for the police to surveil us? For instance, the police already have closed circuit camera networks for which they need no court order to monitor people on. In fact, they can even use them to research subjects retroactively.

What about image recognition on those cameras? It won't be long before they can just punch in a license plate number.

There are already problems along these lines. Here in CT there was a minor kerfuffle over the storage of license plate information (gathered by automatic number plate recognition systems on cruisers) long past the stated purpose of identifying stolen vehicles and expired registrations wanted individuals. This fact was actually concealed from the public until there was a full-court press to discover the truth. These kinds of legal questions are no longer theoretical; the feared actions are now happening as predicted.

How comfortable do you feel about the government compiling a dossier of your movements? Do you believe that there isn't some chance that this data will tempt someone to use it improperly?

It feels inevitable, given where technology is heading --- not only in terms of my personal effects emanating trace information about my location, but also just because monitoring and sensing networks are getting so much cheaper.

It also feels (word chosen carefully) like this capability is going to have more positive uses than negative ones. If I want to focus my energy on the law enforcement stuff that really matters, then perhaps I focus on whether we're criminalizing the right things (for instance: drug criminalization is a debacle), and whether we're appropriately constraining the ability of the police to detain and physically search us.

I don't believe that this kind of technology can't be limited in practice and in the law to protect us from the downsides while giving us most of the upside.

We were able to develop a framework to protect telephonic communication (against the wishes of law enforcement I might add) and I think something similar can be accomplished with electronic records compiled by service providers. If the government can pass a law making it illegal for me to sell lemonade without the appropriate permits, they sure as heck can pass a law restricting the sale or distribution of personal data.

I want my location to be made available (to others) to serve ME, but not propagated wantonly willy-nilly to the highest bidder. That's REALLY the major issue here; if these records are permitted to be generated for "legitimate business purposes permitted by law" then it's a free for all, since those records can be subpoenaed. But if we make certain classes of those records "personal identifiable data" then it's easy to erect a barrier to that information legally. The cops and marketers will complain to holy hell about it but I feel like it's a necessary step we as a society need to take to prevent total abuse by the powers-that-be.

>Doesn't every criminal who is followed by a surreptitious police tail then get to claim the same reasonable expectation that nobody should have known about his specific transit from a drug corner to the stash house?

I think that this sentence reveals everything about your position: you aren't thinking in terms of citizens but rather in terms of criminals. And this reveals binary thinking that, fundamentally, cops are the good guys and anyone they are interested in are bad guys, and cops can and should use any and all tools in their power to track down and stop those bad guys.

This is a deeply problematic view to a lot of people here and elsewhere. We have all seen video of the police murdering the homeless; we have all seen video of police brutalizing bystanders and stealing/destroying their recording equipment. And for every concrete video, there are hundreds, thousands of stories of police bullying, abusing, and otherwise misusing their power. We have all heard of photographers being needlessly hassled, and the various abuses, mistakes, and humiliations that the TSA visits upon Americans and America's visitors every day. And that's just here in the USA. I have personally witnessed several instances of petty abuses of police power, physically assaulted for "mouthing off" to an OC Sheriff (I had a camera and would not give it to him, and he grabbed it and the strap and threw me down), and have a friend who was traumatized as a boy by an officer of the law.

One of the biggest problems with how policing is done is that police look for anything "out of the ordinary", and then act to discourage it. If your look or lifestyle is out of the ordinary, you're a target. If you are doing something on your property that is out of the ordinary, you're a target.

Intrusive, scary, brutal, arbitrary, conformist. And these are the people you want to give even more authority and power and control to?

No thanks. We already have police driving around with heavy weaponry in their vehicles, while elsewhere in the world somehow the police make due with a nightstick. They already passively scan license plates for DMV paperwork violations. There is no need to give them more power, more information, or more control over me, my information, or my life.

What you've done here is instead of addressing my argument, invented a cartoon caricature of the arguer (your cartoon version of me favors heavily armed police who assault people for "mouthing off") to argue with instead.

Golly, I am sorry. I thought you might like to know that you have a pervasive bias that is distorting your understanding so badly that it would cause you to argue for police powers on an Orwellian magnitude. But, since I am not interested in rearranging the deck chairs of specific arguments on your moral and ethical Titanic, I'll leave you alone with your thoughts.

I think it's damning that the police go out of their way to hide they are performing this kind of surveillance. It's as if they know it's wrong!

I doubt any officers think that it's wrong, but most are no doubt aware that this thing that is making their jobs easier is unpopular with the public and likely to be barred by courts when challenged. Best, then, to keep it as quiet as possible.

This, absolutely. The police have a dim view of virtually every restriction of their powers. And that makes sense. The police know well that in the overwhelming majority of the situations they work in, society wants and needs the police to intervene. They're spending all day locking up bona fide criminals, and, in urban areas, worrying about getting shot.

And all that means is that the police shouldn't be left to regulate themselves. And, they aren't.

Wrong (morally) isn't the problem. It's that it's illegal, and they know that. Law enforcement operating above the law is not law enforcement.

Food for thought - all law enforcement operates above the law. They all intimidate, kidnap and assault and some of them even kill. A law enforcement officer who operates within the law wouldn't ever raise his fist.

They say that power corrupts yet we wonder why our security forces are corrupt. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely yet we wonder why the highest leadership commits atrocities. They say that anarchy is disorder but they've never looked in a dictionary. They say it's the best system we have yet we try no other. They say it's for our good yet they're the rich ones. I say it's no good, yet I'm the one who's crazy.

They say that anarchy is disorder but they've never looked in a dictionary.

1) b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority

2) b : absence of order : DISORDER

-- http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy

Ahem, I meant to write anarchism.

For what its worth, my phone was stolen last month and had Lookout Mobile Security installed. It pinpointed the location down to a few meters. Still the cops more-or-less said, "Oh, that's nice but we can't use that." They said that civilian tracking apps that use the cell network are only usable down to the tower, matter how exact it claims to be. This was in a big SF Bay Area city with a well-funded, adequate, and tech savvy police force.

Your phone tracking software is non-binding and irrelevant in court. It says so in the user agreements you click-through. That said, its nice to have the ability to wipe and lock the device remotely.

I was mugged in Chicago last summer and my phone was stolen. The phone and the people who mugged me were in police custody ten minutes later because of cell tower phone tracking. The police asked questions about what tracking the phone did; I have no doubt they'd have used that information too.

(Of course, this is a case in which I obviously would have consented to them tracking my phone).

Today I learned to remove the battery from any wireless device _immediately_ after stealing it :P

It took ten minutes for you to call the police, track your phone, give the tracking information to police, and for the police to find and apprehend the suspects? That seems astonishingly fast -- how did that all go down?

I am being hyperbolic about the timing by about 2 minutes. I timed it from the call to the police to pulling up in a squad car next to the fast food place where the police detained the muggers and had me ID them.

It was crazy. I told my neighbors: the muggers asked for my bag, I said no, so they settled for $12 and a device that tracked them from space.

That's the police equivalent of saying "Here, have a cookie for your way out."

Call your local alderman, etc and make a stink about it.

Santa Clara PD regularly tracks stolen iPhones. They're also pretty successful in actually catching the people who did it! I've heard a number of calls where one unit is using the iCloud site while others fan out to cover an area.

It can be a pretty entertaining listen.

"And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment."

Anyone fancy taking a guess at what this might be?

So I looked into this and found a case in Fort Worth where a 'Cell Phone Tracker' was purchased and it looks like it is marketed and produced by Harris Corporation.[1]

I found their product list if you want to dig through it. [2]

[1] http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort-Worth-buys-cell-phone-tr... [2] http://publicintelligence.net/harris-corporation-amberjack-s...

Hmm so I'm guessing basically it's a software-defined radio that can predict the frequency hopping algorithms in phones to distinguish an individual handset's communications. Someone showed something like that at some hacker conference in the last few years, but that was reverse engineered. I'm guessing these guys have access to restricted knowledge from the networks/manufacturers.

The actual triangulation of the position once you can do that is pretty trivial I'd imagine, perhaps with some algorithms for compensating for physical obstructions between you and the target.

Seems odd to consider Gilbert "small" given that it's part of the Phoenix metro area. But I guess it technically only says that their police department is small.

This is so terrible, and yet, apart from giving money to the ACLU it's not clear what I can do about it. Theoretically people are supposed to get upset and at least vote to change the policy next election: but who do you even vote for that would change policy?

And why isn't this practice challenged in court by defendants? It seems like a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, and should result in acquittal.

In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment? There are numerous contexts in which the police can literally search your physical person and surroundings without a peep from the court. How is diagnostic logging from cell towers worse than that?

It's possible that, as happened with the FBI GPS case, the police are going to end up needing court orders to get this information in the future. But are you aware of the evidentiary requirements to get similar court orders? They're minimal. The police will get these court orders whenever they ask for them: the history of recorded locations of subjects in active investigations is certainly going to be considered legitimate enough to outweigh the privacy expectations here.

I'm happy if the police end up needing court orders for this, but I'm also happy the police have access to this facility.

The court order is important, because it shines a light into a dark corner. Like cockroaches, bureaucrats engaged in behavior that they believe to be wrong always avoid the light.

Court involvement means court supervision and ultimately a more consistent application of justice. The courts are more trustworthy than a faceless police agency. I agree that it's a good thing that the police have access to this sort of technology -- but someone needs to watch the watchers.

Is there specific evidence in this story or any other story that you can find that the police are engaging in actual, specific behavior that is wrong? I'm not asking "are they behaving as if they're doing something wrong". I mean, has someone actually alleged harm from cell tower spying?

I ask because the police appear to be using this capability in actual investigations. They have a subject, they want to follow the subject. It's not a dragnet kind of thing.

I don't know if it matters whether there is a bona fide investigation or not. The police have broad authority to identify subjects of investigations.

The NYS Department of Labor and the NYS Office of the Inspector General placed GPS devices on the personal vehicles of an employee who was being investigated for timecard abuse. (http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/nyclu-files-suit-...)

This isn't exactly the same, but I think the issues are similar enough for discussion purposes. Police do have the ability to have investigators follow someone to learn about their behavior. But the costs associated with doing this, both in dollars and investigative resources, are high enough that police do not follow subjects 24x7 often -- certainly not to investigate some state employee's time card issues. How low does the bar go? Will the cops track me if I'm suspected of illegally obtaining fireworks? Jump a subway turnstile? Shoplift a candy bar?

This relatively new technology lowers the cost curve so much that the barrier to entry is trivally low. And that is a problem that must be moderated by some power external to the police.

Is anyone harmed? I don't know how you could argue that having the authorities systematically track someone's movements isn't harmful. Even people as irrational as crazy ex-boyfriends track the movements of their ex's to intimidate. How would you feel personally if you found a GPS tracker on your car? Or discovered that your phone was tapped? I would feel sick -- whether I was a criminal or not!

In all three of the cases you cited, you've broken a law. In one of the three cases, you broke a pretty serious law. Why am I supposed to worry that the police are collecting evidence against you if you're actually breaking the law? Who disagrees with those particular laws?

As for your last sentence, the police have needed warrants to tap your phone since the 1950s, and need a warrant to place a GPS tracker on your car, so I'm not sure what the point of those examples is either.

If you're talking about United States v. Antoine Jones, the result the Court reached is not what you describe. The Court ruled that a warrant is required to install a GPS device on a car because the act of installing the device is a seizure (however brief). Unfortunately Kennedy hid behind this narrow ruling; no finding was made on the broader issues of the 4th Amendment and electronic surveillance.

In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?

Agreed, I'd like someone to answer this. As far as I can tell, this isn't especially different from having a detective shadow you, which (unless I'm mistaken) has always been pretty acceptable for law enforcement to do.

For what it's worth, the police do not need a court order to shadow you.

>In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?

"In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court ruled that a party is considered to have been searched, for Fourth Amendment purposes, if that party had a "reasonable expectation of privacy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...

Also from Katz:

What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9210492700696416....

The GPS coordinates of my phone are not known to the general public.

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