
Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV - d0ne
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all
======
ck2
_He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from
someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security._

Without exaggeration, this is exactly how innocent people, some of them
teenagers, ended up in Gitmo (and are still there) via vague tips from people
who didn't like their neighbors and decided to deal with it by reporting them.

~~~
tptacek
The teenagers you're talking about were taken from Afghanistan, right? Not San
Jose.

People make comments about people from the US being "sent to Gitmo" for daring
to stand up to authority here, but it's worth noting that nobody has been
taken from inside the US and held in Guantanamo.

Having noted that, I think we find we don't even need to litigate Gitmo here.
Which is a good thing, because I think you'll have a hard time finding a lot
of people to disagree with you in interesting ways about it. Of course
military and intelligence agencies shouldn't have taken innocent people from
Afghanistan and stuck them in a brig without due process rights. Thankfully,
that has little to do with what the FBI does in San Jose.

~~~
DamnYuppie
The issue I have with that is as it stands right now how would any know if
this is true or not? The NSA and FBI can effectively keep things secret as
they don't have to disclose all that they are doing.

~~~
tptacek
We might as well not discuss at all then, right? How can anyone prove the
negative?

~~~
burgerbrain
Not all discussion needs to adhere to strict logic and proof. It's called
speculation, and silencing it is not acceptable.

------
rtrunck
I wonder what the implications would be should a citizen or group place
tracking devices on police vehicles. Though I'm sure they'd have some law in
their arsenal to call that a crime.

~~~
itg
Some states have a law in their arsenal if you take a video recording of an
officer. Even if they don't, some pissed off cop can just slap on the usual
"disturbing the peace" or "resisting arrest" nonsense on you. There is too
much hero worship for law enforcement and they need to be more accountable and
held to higher standards.

~~~
tptacek
So this would have been a great comment if you just left it at the first
sentence, because it's true that there's an ongoing legal battle in a bunch of
states about the right to record police officers doing their jobs. My home
state of Illinois is one of the worst offenders here. I note, happily, that
the police are tending to lose these fights in court.

The rest of your comment saps your credibility.

"Some pissed off cop can just" &c &c &c --- well, let's not discuss what the
police should be able to do at all then, because this is logic that inevitably
ends up with us throwing up our hands. Or, because we're on Hyperbolic News,
having a debate about whether the citizens of a truly free society need police
at all.

~~~
itg
I added the "pissed off cop" bit because it is true, go search around if you
don't think so. The rest of it shows what I think is a part of the problem.
God forbid we express our opinions and try to have a discussion without
someone making a meta-comment about hn itself as if they are above it all.

~~~
tptacek
The problem isn't that you're expressing an opinion; it's that you're making
an assertion that isn't falsifiable. Of course it's possible some police
officer somewhere is going to act inappropriately. Now what?

------
DamnYuppie
I can't be the only one who finds this disturbing. I have no issue with the
tracking devices or their use. What I find very concerning is that they do not
require a warrant and there is no oversight as to their usage.

~~~
Bluem00
Then you will be interested in this case being argued today in front of the
Supreme Court: [http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/united-states-
v-j...](http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/united-states-v-jones)

Here is the issue: Whether the Constitution allows police to put a tracking
device on a car without either a warrant or the owner's permission; and
whether the Constitution is violated when police use the tracking device to
keep track of the car's whereabouts.

~~~
brador
Non american here, what part of the constitution says they can't track a cars
whereabouts?

~~~
wl
No part states it explicitly (such technology didn't exist when it was
written). People who are arguing against this practice cite the 4th amendment,
which reads as follows:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized."

People are arguing that putting a tracking device on a car constitutes a
search.

------
mindcrime
If I ever find one of these things on my car, I'm taking it off and putting it
on an over-the-road tanker truck, or a Greyhound bus or something. I'll deal
with the fallout, whatever.

Actually, wait... on second thought, an even better plan would be to
disassemble it, and hack it to report bogus data. Like, have it show me doing
nothing but driving around in circles around Groom Lake for hours on end, then
"magically" transporting to Edwards AFB.

~~~
raganwald
You are describing crimes. If you have reason to believe the device was placed
by law enforcement, tampering with its function to deceive them is a criminal
offence.

It’s far better to work to make such activities illegal than to do your
complaining from behind bars.

~~~
mindcrime
_If you have reason to believe the device was placed by law enforcement,
tampering with its function to deceive them is a criminal offence._

No, it's against "the law." It's hardly a crime.

But semantic distinctions aside, I really don't care if it's a crime or not.
If the US governments fucks with me and pisses me off, I'm going to do what
I'm going to do.

 _It’s far better to work to make such activities illegal than to do your
complaining from behind bars._

That's not really an either/or thing. They haven't (yet, as far as I know) put
one of these on my car, and I work on making things like this illegal though
the political process . And I'll continue to do so, up until the
(hypothetical) day that I wind up behind bars for fucking with one of their
silly little tracking devices.

All that said, I can't imagine them ever getting a conviction in a jury trial,
on a charge of "tampering with a government owned device" if it's not labeled
or anything. It's totally reasonable to say "Oh, I found this thing on my car
and I didn't know what it was so I took it off and threw it away" or "I knew
what it was, but I assumed my crazy stalker ex-girlfriend put it there," etc.
Getting any reasonable jury to convict on this would be insanely difficult.

------
yock
Quite frankly, I don't think any legitimate argument can be made that this
kind of surveillance is Constitutional. That's not the most interesting
thought evoked by this story though.

How many of you that are outraged by this leave location services enabled on
your smartphone 24/7? How do hourly location reports compare to the endless
stream of information available from your dormant smartphone? A stream that
can be provided to police in real-time without leaving a single shred of
evidence. At least a little black box is minimally visible, has a finite power
source, and has to be placed and maintained by a person who can be observed.

~~~
Thrymr
I'm not against the authorities being able to subpoena my cell phone records
through legal action. I would be opposed to my provider passing all my records
to any agency without warrant or subpoena.

------
antidaily
_He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from
someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security_

So one guy gets GPS'd because of a vague tip and the other guy because his
cousin might be a drug dealer. Yikes.

~~~
gvb
To clarify, in this particular case the connection was stronger than what you
state. He bought the SUV from his cousin and the tracking device showed up
shortly after he drove his cousin’s wife to Tijuana, I assume with the SUV in
question.

While we can debate whether this is sufficient cause for a planted tracking
device, the connection between him and his cousin is a lot less casual than
what you state.

~~~
bokchoi
Fine, then get a judge to issue a warrant.

~~~
nkassis
Exactly I'm pretty sure what gvb's comment states would be enough to convince
a judge to issue a warrant.

------
feralchimp
Two inevitable events that will bring this situation to a head:

1\. Citizens start throwing these devices into large bodies of water.

2\. Armed citizen returns to vehicle at night, in mall or office parking lot,
as suspicious man stands up from behind citizen's rear wheel well. Citizen
draws down on Federal officer, one or both parties end up dead.

------
Jun8
I think a great way to deal with this problem in a hacker type of way would be
to create and post schematics for a cheap device (e.g. using your old cell
phone or other types of old consumer electronics devices) to detect the
presence of these devices. A big motivation of using these covert devices is
that they work, i.e. the average tracked person is unaware of them. If this
fact can be nullified, then law enforcement people may be less willing to use
such tactics.

~~~
xxbondsxx
GPS signals are everywhere, so the only thing you could intercept would be the
outgoing transponder signal. This could be masked as almost anything....
random cell phone packets, radio waves with local pickup, etc. Hell, they
could even just manually retrieve the data once in a while when your car is
parked outside your house.

So it might be hard to execute, but certainly still a good idea. I just wanted
to point out that GPS logging is entirely passive; only the transmission can
be detected.

~~~
vl
>I just wanted to point out that GPS logging is entirely passive

This is not entirely true, for example:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_detector_detector>

It appears that many, if not all GPS devices use superheterodyne receiver as
well.

------
kristopolous
I once had a paranoid schizophrenic friend that suggested such things were
happening to him. I think it's a bad move when what were previously paranoid
delusions start manifesting themselves as accepted realities.

------
feralchimp
Does the FBI also pull this stunt with cars tagged with consulate plates? That
is, who is offered more civil rights: American citizens on American soil, or
employees of foreign governments on American soil?

------
bgentry
Single page view: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-
times-t...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-
two/all/1)

------
jasongullickson
Out of curiosity, would something like this render the problem moot?
[http://www.meritline.com/super-mini-cigarette-lighter-gps-
bl...](http://www.meritline.com/super-mini-cigarette-lighter-gps-blocker-black
---p-65208.aspx?source=fghdac)

------
leoh
Does anyone know if these things actually transmit as well as record?

~~~
aphyr
Yes, they transmit their location on regular intervals (from the article:
every hour) via the cell network.

------
josscrowcroft
Land of the free, indeed.

------
locusm
Why not have some fun with it - give it to an interstate trucker, or to your
Aunt who is heading off to Australia...

------
drivebyacct2
I've been arguing against this stuff for over 6 years since I got heavily
involved in discussions of the Patriot Act and the erosion of the Fourth
Amendment in policy debate. This has been going on for a long time in various
forms (FISA courts/warrants, National Security Letters, widespread [near
universal] wiretapping, etc).

I'm not sure what to do about it, or more importantly how to get people to
care. It's like the article a while back (I'll try to find the source on it)
that quoted a huge percentage of people as being opposed to government
survelliance who only two years earlier had vehemently defended it as
necessary for security. It's called a slippery slope for a reason, and every
time the Patriot Act it is reauthorized without consideration is a slap in the
face to the Founding Fathers who refused to sign the Constitution without a
Bill of Rights.

The thing that bothers me the most is the "Conservatives" (who are supposed to
be in favor of small, unintrusive government) that hook-and-line fall for the
"Patriotism" guise and excuse these government intrusions with, at times,
absurd leaps of logic (that often fly in the face of evidence and statistics
from the very organizations carrying out these actions).

~~~
tptacek
If you'd like to take a shot at it, feel free to try to convince me that I
should be concerned about warrantless GPS tracking of subject cars.

* I'm a good-faith commenter on HN and not inclined to troll you or piss you off for no reason.

* I'm a liberal Democrat.

* I donate money to the ACLU.

* I do not think it is unreasonable for law enforcement agencies to designate, during the course of an actual investigation of a specific target, individual cars for GPS surveillance:

\- so long as removing the devices if they're detected isn't a crime

\- and research and development of technologies that shield cars from GPS
monitoring isn't banned

My reasoning: the police already have the clear and reasonable right to
surveil cars from a distance either by ground patrol cars or aerial
surveillance. That low-tech surveillance, which has never required a warrant,
is actually _more intrusive_ than a GPS device, in that it records your actual
actions at each location.

I'm not generally opposed to things that allow law enforcement to do a better
job with fewer resources.

I don't want to get into the Patriot Act or anything; we're talking about GPS
transponders, which is a specific concept we can actually get our heads
around. So let's try!

~~~
jerf
"I'm not generally opposed to things that allow law enforcement to do a better
job with fewer resources."

While I freely concede I'm making a "balance" argument and as such there can
be reasonable disagreement on where the correct balance is, there is a bound
on how far you want to take that. It is not a _bad_ thing that law enforcement
takes some effort, as it serves as a sort of natural counter on excessively
zealous enforcement, one far more effective than any law or ACLU lawsuit could
ever be. The goal isn't to make the police job as easy as possible, the goal
is to serve justice.

This makes it easy to keep an eye on a much larger number of people with
little increase in manpower, and the problem there is that by increasing the
amount of data, while at the same time reducing the quality of the priors on
the data that the person (or perhaps rather the _vehicle_ ) in question has
committed some sort of crime, you will start encountering the classic signal
processing problem where you will inevitably start to get more false
positives. Requiring a warrant to drop these on somebody's car, and therefore
requiring some sort of prior probable cause, isn't just good civil liberties
(because those false positives hurt real people), it's good statistics.

Doing "the same thing as before, only more easily" is still an important
qualitative change in law enforcement and security in general, and I think you
need an argument more powerful than that to justify the change in question.

~~~
tptacek
Should they be allowed to track _everyone_? No. I'm comfortable with the
limitation that someone has to actually walk up to the subject vehicle and
attach a device to it.

If you want to talk about things like dragnetting every car on the road
through things like OnStar, this is going to be a very boring conversation,
because I can't imagine anyone on HN --- myself included --- is comfortable
with that idea.

(Even though it's inevitably going to happen, not because law enforcement is
grasping, but because technological progress is going to make access to that
information the default).

~~~
gojomo
Falling costs and shrinking size mean that over time, your standards of
'walking up and attaching' and 'detection and removal is allowed' will become
less meaningful over time. They could become so cheap, ubiquitous, and nearly
undetectable that your 'same activity just more resource efficient' standard
will allow a quantitative difference to become a qualitative difference.

~~~
tptacek
And I'll be right there with you when that happens. But right now, what's
happening seems to this particular liberal who is generally concerned with his
civil liberties to be reasonable.

~~~
gojomo
I think the problem is then: how do you decide, and build a consensus, about
how much use is _too much_ use? Especially given that the use is covert, you
might not even know when it passes the threshold you might find abhorrent.

That's why my preferred kind of civil liberty protection relies on bright-line
rules. Saying, "it's OK until it starts to feel excessive" is an invitation to
law enforcement to go up to, and then beyond, that abusive line – in secret –
waiting for some sort of delayed backlash as the only check.

------
nobody3141592
Presumably if you discover a suspect package under your vehicle you would call
the fire service and the bomb squad.

(Then quietly also call the local news service.)

~~~
dotBen
This is an example of one of those situations where it doesn't pay to be 'over
clever'.

If you call the bomb squad to report a bomb under your car but as a
technology-inclined person/geek know full well it's a GPS receiver then you're
committing all sorts of illegality there.

~~~
ceejayoz
I can't imagine these things have "GPS RECEIVER" stamped on the outside. How
are they going to prove you knew it was a GPS?

~~~
nobody3141592
Given my experience in dealing with military intelligence types - they
probably have "PROPERTY OF FBI - SECRET UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS DEPT" printed on
them along with an address and an orange flashing light.

------
georgieporgie
_driving a Crown Victoria with tinted windows._

Well, the GPS thing might be up for debate, but tinted front side windows are
illegal in CA. :-)

~~~
alirov
Almost true. You can have the front side windows tinted as long as 70% of
light still gets through. Which in actuality is fairly close to not tinting at
all. The windshield of course can't have any tint whatsoever except on the top
4 inches.

------
shareme
I think its time for a Hacker Kit to disable GPS tracking units that LAw
Enforcement uses. Make it so simple that common motorist can use..and make it
viral by having a open source license..we outnumber law enforcement by large
numbers..and they do not have the manpower to face that set of circumstances

~~~
giardini
Seems that wrapping it in several layers of foil and tossing it in a waste
cntainer would be enough to keep 'em busy for awhile. After some handling the
foil would likely come off and they could retrieve their toy: "Why are we
following a garbage truck, now?" No fun digging though the city dump though.

