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.

The case involved the conviction of Antoine Jones, a suspected drug dealer in the District of Columbia who was arrested after being monitored for 28 days by a GPS tracking device surreptitiously attached to his Jeep by law enforcement agents without a warrant.

Based on the court’s decision, law enforcement must first obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device to a suspect’s car and monitoring him.

The court was divided, however, as to what level of GPS tracking would require a search warrant. Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking for a five-member majority, said the police erred because they attached the tiny tracking device to the vehicle. He said the 4th Amendment was intended to protect against government searches on private property, reported the LA Times.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS tracking device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Scalia said. “The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information,” he said.

Such a search is unconstitutional unless officers obtained a search warrant from a judge. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined Scalia’s opinion.

Meanwhile, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he would go further and rule that the “long-term monitoring” of the vehicle with a GPS tracking device violated the 4th Amendment regardless of whether the device was attached to a car. He took the view that the government violated a motorist’s right to privacy by tracking his movements for weeks on end.

The difference between the Scalia and Alito approaches is important. As both Alito and Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, not every wireless surveillance will involve a physical interference with property. As wireless technology and cars become more sophisticated, Scalia’s test will become more and more irrelevant.

For example, what happens if the police started tracking a suspect from his car’s internal GPS navigation system? Or what if the police tapped into your cell phone’s GPS navigation system and then started monitoring you?

GPS tracking, law enforcement and 4th Amendment privacy rights

In a major decision on privacy in the digital age, in a case the NY Times dubbed “the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday that police cannot put a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car to track his movements without a warrant.

This is the first time the Supreme Court confronted the government’s growing use of digital tracking technology to monitor Americans and ruled strongly in favor of privacy, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The ruling, which marked the justices’ first-ever review of GPS tracking, was unanimous. The justices divided, however, on how the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to such high-tech GPS tracking.

The high court’s ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration and the US Justice Department, who defended the use of GPS tracking devices without a warrant and without a person’s knowledge as a legal way to monitor a vehicle on public streets.

The case began in 2005 when police officers went to a public parking lot in Maryland and secretly installed a GPS tracking device on a Jeep Grand Cherokee used by a Washington, D.C. nightclub owner, Antoine Jones, reported Reuters.

Jones was suspected of drug trafficking and the police tracked his movements for a month. The resulting evidence played a key role in his conviction for conspiring to distribute cocaine.

On Monday, the Supreme Court reversed the life sentence of Jones, saying the government violated Jones’ privacy rights in clandestinely tracking his movement for a month.

All nine justices agreed in upholding the appeals court decision, but at least four justices would have gone even further in finding fault not only with the attachment of the device, but also with the lengthy monitoring.

Monday’s decision specifically applies when police install GPS on a person’s car. But five justices suggested in concurring statements that a warrant might similarly be needed for prolonged surveillance through smartphones or other devices equipped with GPS.

Justice Antonin Scalia said the government’s installation of the device, and its use of the GPS to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constituted a search, meaning a warrant was required. “Officers encroached on a protected area,” Scalia wrote.

Relying on a centuries-old legal principle, he concluded that the police action without a warrant was a trespass and therefore an illegal search. He was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

For more information on the details of the Jones case, please go to http://www.fieldtechnologies.com/is-it-legal-for-law-enforcement-to-use-gps-tracking-without-a-warrant-justice-dept-says-yes/

To his supervisors, Fred Robinson must have seemed the ideal employee. Every weekday that he worked in 2010, except for one, Robinson started work at precisely 7:30 a.m., according to his time sheets.

Robinson, a full-time employee for the St. Louis City Treasurer for over 5 years, was supposed to be spending his days cruising city streets, looking for broken parking meters or illegally parked vehicles that hadn’t been ticketed. But things about Mr. Robinson’s work weren’t adding up.

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.”

It turns out, while Robinson was supposed to be at his job for the City Treasurer’s office, he was actually embezzling money from his 2nd job, where he was a board member of the Paideia Academy charter school.

Robinson was indicted in September 2011 on one count of wire fraud and seven counts of federal program theft. He was accused of looting more than $250,000 of public money from the now defunct Paideia Academy charter school to use for his day care business, and as much as $175,000 from his no-show or “ghost employee” job at the Treasurer’s office.

Robinson has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.

GPS tracking shows companies what their field employees are doing and holds them accountable. FieldLogix GPS tracking system can provide you with daily reports and real-time alerts of items such as:

- Late Starts
– Long Lunch Breaks
– Excessive Idle Times
– Poor Driver Routing
– Speeding
– Unauthorized Vehicle Use
– Exaggerated Time Sheets

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.

Robinson was indicated in September on one count of wire fraud and seven counts of federal program theft. Robinson’s lawyer argued that the GPS tracking results should not be allowed for several reasons, including the agents’ failure to get a warrant and violations of his Constitutional rights.

But Magistrate Judge David Noce disagreed, finding that appellate courts have found use of the tracking devices legal. His ruling stated:

Here, installation of the GPS tracker device onto defendant Robinson’s Cavalier was not a ’search’ because defendant Robinson did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the exterior of his Cavalier. Agents installed the GPS tracker device onto defendant’s Cavalier based on a reasonable suspicion that he was being illegally paid as a ‘ghost’ employee on the payroll of the St. Louis City Treasurer’s Office.

Installation of the GPS tracker device was non-invasive; a magnetic component of the GPS tracker device allowed it to be affixed to the exterior of the Cavalier without the use of screws and without causing any damage to the exterior of the Cavalier. The GPS tracker device was installed when the Cavalier was on a public street near defendant’s residence. Installation of the GPS tracker device revealed no information to the agents other than the public location of the vehicle. Under these circumstances, installation of the GPS tracker device was not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court is set to weigh in on the GPS tracking issue later this year, when it will begin hearing arguments in a case  The New York Times recently dubbed “the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade.” The court’s ruling in US v Jones will have a far-reaching impact on society, and on law enforcement and warrantless GPS tracking practices.

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.

In the US v. Jones case, law enforcement agents installed a GPS tracking device on an automobile that was parked on private property.  They then used the GPS to track the position of the vehicle every ten seconds for a full month – without obtaining a search warrant.

A US Court of Appeals has already ruled that the surveillance was unconstitutional without a warrant, but the the Obama Administration has appealed the decision. The government has made it clear they believe GPS tracking devices may be affixed to suspects’ vehicles sans a warrant. They do not consider this to be an invasion of privacy or a violation of one’s 4th Amendment Rights.

GPS tracking, which allows police to follow as many people as they want for as long as they want without expending many resources, takes invasion of privacy to a new level. As Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in an appeals court decision in Jones’ favor, prolonged GPS surveillance “reveals an intimate picture of the subject’s life that he expects no one to have — short perhaps of his spouse.”

According to Wired Magazine, Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told the Supreme Court in November oral arguments that federal authorities employ warrantless GPS monitoring “in the low thousands annually.” Dreeben also said the government could affix GPS tracking devices, without warrants, to the vehicles of the nine members of the Supreme Court.

Many of the justices were skeptical of the government’s position, saying the United States could evolve into a surveillance state if the Supreme Court sides with the government.

Justice Stephen Breyer told Dreeben, “If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day every citizen of the United States.”

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.

The GPS system, 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.

The Chinese military may also have access to more accurate data, but because China has fewer satellites, it can’t monitor the same spot for as long as the U.S. According to defense experts, Beidou could help the Chinese military identify, track and strike U.S. ships in the region in the event of armed conflict.

China began building an experimental precursor to Beidou in 2000 with the goal of creating its own global system—called Compass—with 35 satellites, by 2020. The only other operational global system apart from GPS is Russia’s Glonass, although the European Union’s Galileo system is set to be completed by 2020.

For more information, please visit: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203479104577123600791556284.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_News_BlogsModule.

The GPS-Based ‘I Just Made Love’ app has been downloaded over 10,000 times, and rated five stars by dozens of users, Daily Mail UK reported.

• GPS enabled app tags where and when
• Can also offer a score out of five
• App is available for free on iTunes
• Downloaded over 10,000 times
• Works on Android & iPhone

The I Just Made Love site claims to have recorded 193,000 ‘acts of love’, along with where the event occurred and a limited amount of context – very limited, in fact, offering only the options of Inside, Outdoors, In a Car and On a Boat.

The app lets you record where, when and even in what position you ‘made love’ – and then upload it to an online database – with your comments.

Carrier IQ tracking software has been found to log every keystroke pressed, website visited and text message sent by 150 million mobile phone users, reported CNN.

Now Federal investigators are probing allegations that Carrier IQ tracking software recorded user activity and sent the information to the cellphone companies without informing consumers, according to government officials, reported the Washington Post.

Executives of the tracking software firm traveled to Washington Tuesday and also met with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is responsible for protecting consumers and enforcing privacy laws.

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.

“Carrier IQ has discovered that, due to this bug, in some unique circumstances, such as when a user receives an SMS during a call, or during a simultaneous data session, SMS messages may have unintentionally been included in the layer 3 signalling traffic that is collected by the IQ agent,” the California-based company said in a technical explanation of its software (PDF). “These messages were encoded and embedded in layer 3 signalling traffic and are not human readable.”

Three of the four major cellular providers — AT&T (T), T-Mobile, and Sprint (S) — have said they use Carrier IQ’s tracking software in line with their own privacy policies. A Verizon spokesman said the program is not present on any of the company’s mobile devices. Apple (AAPL) has said it would remove Carrier IQ from iPhones in a future software update.

Yep, that’s right, the tracking software is from a company called Carrier IQ, according to the WSJ.  Several wireless carriers, including Sprint Nextel Corp., AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA, have the Carrier IQ tracking software installed on their devices and users cannot uninstall it. Each said they use the tracking technology to monitor their networks and improve service.

The tracking software was discovered by a security expert, Trevor Eckhart,  and revealed to the public through blog posts and video on You Tube. Eckhart, using an HTC cell phone with an Android operating system, shows the software  is not transparently visible to consumers, and is shown tracking actions such as when buttons are pressed and collecting personal data such as the content of text messages.

This has raised huge privacy concerns, as more and more customers are becoming aware of the situation.  As a result, a lawsuit was filed against AT&T Inc. (NYSE: ATT), Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and T-Mobile USA by mobile phone customers who claim that Carrier IQ Inc. tracking software installed on their phones violates U.S. wiretapping and computer fraud laws. The case is Pacilli v. Carrier IQ, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington) and was filed last week, said Bloomberg News.

AT&T and Sprint, the second- and third-largest U.S. wireless providers, said in e-mailed statements on Dec. 1 that the software data is used to improve service performance. Apple stopped supporting Carrier IQ in most products and will remove it completely in a future software update, Natalie Harrison, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a Dec. 1 e-mail.

“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.

At this point it seems highly unlikely that LightSquared will be able to fire up it network anytime soon.

LightSquared, backed by $3 billion from Philip Falcone’s Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund, has spent roughly $14 billion creating the network.  The company faces challenges from makers of GPS devices who say the service will disrupt navigation by cars, boats, tractors and planes. U.S. regulators are withholding approval as they check on claims of interference.

Agencies participating in the testing included the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration, according to the draft summary. Companies participating included GPS makers Trimble Navigation Ltd. and Garmin Ltd., farm-gear maker Deere & Co., and General Motor Co.’s OnStar unit, according to the summary.

The full results of the testing are expected to be presented in Washington on December 14, and the FCC itself is expected to decide next year whether LightSquared can move forward with its plan to offer high-speed mobile Internet service to as many as 260 million people using 40,000 base stations. The service would operate on airwaves formerly reserved mainly for satellites, and near those used by GPS devices.