You're Going to Need a Warrant For That, Officer

FBI Tracking Device found on American citizen's car
without a warrant. (Source)

Sandra Fulton
ACLU

Last year Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, found a strange device attached to his car. When he posted a photo of it online, the FBI showed up at his home two days later. They wanted their GPS tracking device back. The FBI had been tracking Afifi’s movement for months without his knowing about it. Moreover, the agency did so without a warrant and apparently based on the flimsy rationale that his friend wrote a blog they felt was questionable. This type of warrantless tracking seems to be an increasingly common government practice.

Following this incident, as well as revelations about how much location information Apple and Google are storing about their customers, there has been a significant public outcry over the privacy of location information. Congress has held a number of hearings on the topic and today Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced companion bills in the Senate and House, respectively, to protect location privacy. The bills not only require law enforcement to get a warrant based on probable cause before accessing location information, but also regulate the use of this information by businesses. With location tracking cases popping up all over the country, this would provide a strong and clear national standard for law enforcement.

Chinese Spying Devices Installed on Hong Kong Cars

Editor's Note: And of course the same is being planned for the United States as The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the government can track cars via GPS  and black boxes will be mandated for all new cars . . but it's the Land of the Free, nothing like China.

image appears at Infowars

Albert Ding and Matthew Robertson
The Epoch Times

For years now Chinese authorities have been installing spying devices on all dual-plate Chinese-Hong Kong vehicles, enabling a vast network of eavesdropping across the archipelago, according to a Hong Kong newspaper.

The report in Apple Daily states that the recording devices began being installed as “inspection and quarantine cards” in July 2007. They were installed without charge by the Shenzhen Inspection and Quarantine Bureau on thousands of vehicles.

Read Full Article 

RELATED ACTIVIST POST ARTICLE:
10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced and Databased

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Feds to Mandate Black Box on all New Cars

Editor's Note: See, the Patriot Act did create innovative technology. Congress says let's keep the surveillance-industrial complex strong for at least another 4 years.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars

The Feds will mandate next month that all new cars be fitted with a black box, according to news reports. So-called black boxes record information about speed, seat belt use and brake application.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been involved in the use of black boxes since their introduction. In 2006, the safety administration encouraged but did not require automobile manufacturers to install the systems and also did not set a single standard for the way data would be recorded, according to the New York Times.

FBI using GPS to track activists (Video)

Youtube


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Big Brother Gov't Seeks to Tax and Track All Drivers

Dees Illustration

Eric Blair
Activist Post

"Oh, say can you see...the land of the fee, and home of the slave?" Americansreally better wake up before it's too late. Perhaps it already is. 

Today Pete Kasperowicz of The Hill reported that the Obama administration, following a March Congressional Budget Office report, has "floated" the idea of taxing drivers per mile.  Kasperowicz writes: 

The plan is a part of the administration’s 'Transportation Opportunities Act,' an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly. 

...Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations. (my emphasis) 

If this doesn't alert you to the direction of America, I don't know what will. The government wants to tax Americans for simply leaving their homes, and track their cars via mandatory GPS chips.

Feds to Supreme Court: Allow Warrantless GPS Monitoring

Navstar GPS Wikimedia Commons

David Kravets
Wired

The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The Justice Department, saying “a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements (.pdf) from one place to another,” is demanding the justices undo a lower court decision that reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month without a court warrant.

The petition, if accepted by the justices, arguably would make it the biggest Fourth Amendment case in a decade — one weighing the collision of privacy, technology and the Constitution.

In 2001, the justices said thermal-imaging devices used to detect marijuana-growing operationsinside a house amounted to a search requiring a court warrant. The justices are likely to accept the government’s petition to clear conflicting lower-court rulings on when warrants are required for GPS tracking.

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Student finds tracking device on his car; FBI demands it back

Scientific American

Daniel Tencer

Raw Story

A Silicon Valley college student says the FBI confronted him and threatened to "make things difficult" for him if he didn't hand over a GPS tracking device he found on his car, says a report at Wired.com.

Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old marketing student at Mission College who is partially of Egyptian extraction, said he found the device last Sunday when he took his car to a mechanic, and saw wires sticking out of the underside, near the exhaust pipe.

He told Wired he had "done nothing to merit attention from authorities."

A friend of Afifi's, identified only as Khaled, posted pictures of the device to Reddit.com, where a user quickly identified it as a Guardian ST820 tracking unit, manufactured by Cobham, which, according to Wired, only sells the device to law enforcement agencies.

As Afifi and Khaled pondered a number of plans for the device -- including selling it on Craigslist or attaching it to another car -- the FBI showed up, admitted it had planted the device, and demanded it back, Afifi told Wired.

Read Full Article

RELATED ARTICLE:
10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased

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