February 1, 2012 – 1:44 am
he Supreme Court ruled last week that the police violated the Constitution when they hid a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device on a man’s car and monitored his movements for 28 days.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling was an important one for all U.S. citizens, yet the court left many questions unanswered.
The NY Times once dubbed the case, U.S. v. Jones, “the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade.” It is the first time the Supreme Court confronted the government’s growing use of digital technology to monitor Americans and ruled strongly in favor of privacy.
January 24, 2012 – 2:52 am
GPS tracking, law enforcement and 4th Amendment privacy rights. Police cannot put a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car to track his movements without a warrant.
January 13, 2012 – 10:45 am
The FBI became aware of the situation and started to suspect that Mr. Robinson was a “no-show” employee at the St. Louis City Treasurer’s Office, alleging that he collected $175,000 in paychecks without ever actually going to work.
So the FBI secretly placed a GPS tracking device onto the bottom of his Chevrolet Cavalier and used it to track his whereabouts for the next two months. What the FBI found Mr. Robinson doing during work hours was unbelievable…
Using data gathered from the GPS tracking device, Special Agent Monique Comeau testified in a St. Louis Court that Robinson was not doing any of the work that he claimed to be doing on the time sheets that he submitted to his bosses. She testified that Robinson typically had a much more relaxed schedule, leaving his house at 9 a.m., spending an hour at a local diner, then driving between his second job as the head of a charter school and his third job, starting his own day care.
Fox News reported that Robinson “spent more time eating than working.”
January 4, 2012 – 1:51 pm
Law enforcement agents do not need to obtain a warrant before placing a secret GPS tracking device on your vehicle, says a Missouri federal judge, who just ruled the FBI did not need a warrant to secretly attach a GPS tracking device to a government employee’s car to track his public movements for two months.
The FBI suspected that Fred Robinson was a “no-show employee” at the St. Louis City Treasurer’s Office — alleging that he collected $175,000 in paychecks without ever actually going to work, reports the Post-Dispatch and Forbes Magazine. While the FBI was investigating Robinson for this and for stealing money from a charter school, agents snuck a GPS tracking device onto the bottom of his Chevrolet Cavalier in January 2010 and used it to track his whereabouts for the next two months.
A court opinion notes that it would have taken “five or six agents” to do it without the GPS tracking device. The tracking device data allegedly proved that the employment time sheets Robinson submitted to the Treasury Office January through March were false.
January 4, 2012 – 1:50 pm
GPS Tracking Takes Privacy Invasion to a Whole New Level
In November 2011, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in US v Jones, a case The New York Times recently dubbed “the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade.”
The Jones case will set the precedent for the legality and limitations of GPS tracking without a warrant. The Supreme Courts will address a question that has divided the lower courts for years: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?
The NY Times said, “the answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.
January 3, 2012 – 3:01 am
gps satellite tracking systemLast week China launched Beidou, its own version of America’s GPS System. China’s new global positioning system, called the Beidou Navigation Satellite System started providing initial positioning, navigation and timing services ina and around China last week, said spokesman Ran Chengqi in a news conference.
To date China has launched 10 satellites for the Beidou GPS system. By the end of 2012 China plans to have six more satellites in orbit, to enhance the system’s accuracy and expand its service to cover most of the Asian-Pacific region.
China’s Beidou still can’t compete with the U.S.’s GPS system in terms of how long, and how accurately it can monitor any part of the globe from space, but this will be changing in the near future.
GPS, which was launched for civilian use in 1995, now consists of 30 satellites and can be accurate to within less than 10 meters, or 33 feet, although the U.S. military has access to more precise readings. Mr. Ran said Beidou was accurate to within 25 meters and would reduce that to 10 meters by the end of next year.
December 17, 2011 – 10:06 am
Thousands of people use apps such as Foursquare that allows users to share where they eat, drink and shop. Now the ‘I Just Made Love’ lets you log and GPS-tag your private life in just the same way – and, bizarrely, some people seem to want to.
December 14, 2011 – 1:04 pm
Federal investigators are probing allegations that Carrier IQ software found on about 150 million cellphones tracked user activity and sent the information to the cellphone companies without informing consumers, according to government officials, reported the Washington Post. Executives from Carrier IQ traveled to Washington Tuesday and met with officials at the Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for protecting consumers and enforcing privacy laws. The executives also met with the Federal Communications Commission.
Carrier IQ, the tracking software company, has said its software is not designed to capture keystrokes or the content of messages, but in some cases that may have happened by accident. The company said it inadvertently collected some SMS messages as the result of a software bug, but the data is intended to help improve user experience with smartphones.
December 12, 2011 – 12:09 pm
Did you know there is hidden software on millions of smartphones that records every interaction a user has with the device, as well as his location, then sends that information off the phone in a totally unencrypted way without letting the user know?
December 12, 2011 – 11:19 am
Leaked government test results show that “LightSquared signals caused harmful interference to majority of GPS receivers tested” according to the Bloomberg news service. The report concludes that “millions of GPS units are not compatible” with LightSquared’s network.
“No additional testing is required to confirm harmful interference exists… The wireless service caused interference to 75 percent of the global-positioning system (GPS) receivers examined in a U.S. government test,” says the draft.
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