Posted on 07/19/2012 3:27:34 PM PDT by Altariel
KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -
A Kansas City couple says the DEA busted down their front door, and they did absolutely nothing wrong.
The address the DEA searched was in fact the one they got a warrant for, but the concern is about what sent the federal agents there - a photo and the GPS info attached to it.
Shanila Jimerson was already suffering from wrist and knee pain when agents told her to hit the floor, and a panic attack set in.
"All I seen was an AK and they say open the door," Jimerson said. "I started telling him, 'I'm getting sick, because I don't know what's going on. Please tell me what's going on.' And he was like, 'I don't know, shut up!'," she said.
It was 6:15 p.m. Thursday. Her husband says he answered the knock just as the battering ram hit.
"And he is like, 'Freeze. Freeze, don't move. Don't move.'," Marco Christian said.
A search warrant came back as "nothing seized."
Earlier that day, an undercover deal for $18,000 worth of methamphetamine went bad when the suspect got wise, led police on a chase, and wrecked.
Agents seized an iPhone from the suspect's car and found some photos of what appeared to be drug money. On those photos were geotags, latitude and longitude identifiers.
However, when KCTV5 keyed in that info, Christians' address appeared for one photo and a neighbor's home for the other, neither of which returned any local police activity in recent months.
Now, the Christians say they have mental and physical damage to deal with, and they want law enforcement to reconsider how useful the technology is.
"I just think they should make sure their evidence is more substantial than this, a photo with a longitude and latitude. Everybody knows a GPS is not totally 100-percent accurate," Christian said.
Authorities could not say how accurate the geotags on phones really are. The DEA referred KCTV5's Betsy Webster to the U.S. Attorney's Office where no one would comment due to the drug case being still under investigation.
< /S >
It wasn’t an AK. An MP5 or M4 but not an AK. Still scares the carp out of ya. When is this stuff gonna stop?
The problem is not the GPS, its the mapping between GPS data and street address data. In my county, this information does not accurately correlate. My navigation system takes you to my neighbors farm when you enter my address, I haven’t checked to see where his address maps, but you can be it isn’t at his house. Since he is a bit of a shady character, such data disconnects are a cause for concern.
It’s all about police state control. This type of thing will happen more and more until people get the message: don’t mess with the police (they are not here to help you. They are here to help the state control you).
It looks like Obama is getting his way:
“We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the military.
The question is: when will more Freepers stop defending it?
This stuff is really getting scary.
The article said it “appeared to be drug money”. What “appearance” does drug money have? Even if it’s covered in white powder that doesn’t prove it’s drug money.
Some will say it’s drug money if it’s marked and given to a drug dealer. Would that show up in a picture? So, the answer is it’s drug money if a cop tells a judge it’s drug money so they can get a no knock warrant.
And what the hell is a GOEtag?
GPS is not meant to be used indoors.
1) No GPS receiver is designed to be used indoors at any time and any operation you get is gratituous and likely to have large errors.
2) Multipath results when the direct path to your receiver is blocked (by your body, your house, roof, trees, mountains, buildings, etc) and the signal from the satellite is REFLECTED by some object. The reflecting surface may be: buildings, mountains, the ground, or any object that happens to be a radio reflector at 1.6Ghz.
3) Multipath are radio signals which have traveled FURTHER to get to your receiver than they should have. This can result in your GPS miscalculating its position because the signals may have traveled from feet to miles further to get to you than a direct line of sight signal path would have been.
4) Multipath can cause longer term “stable” errors or it can cause your position to wander at varying rates (even thousands of miles per hour if your GPS could follow such speeds). Sometimes GPS wanderings caused by multipath can cause your GPS to “jump” from one position to another as the multipath signal “comes and goes” and causes your GPS to jump from using one group of erroneous signals to another. These “jumps” can add substantial distances to the tracklog measurements in some GPS receivers.
geotags Is the insertion of location data into digital picture file. Location will only be as accurate as the device collecting the location. Iphone is not that accurate.
Translation: They had cash on hand.
A good percentage of the cash circulating in America tests positive for residue.
It gives the police a good excuse to seize cash as “evidence”.
When they realize some citizens have houses that are harder to get into and they stock AP rounds?
GPS is a prediction where a device(GPS attena) is located and is fairly accurate in open country. The cell towers may provide location information by triangulation and direction and timing of signal and a SBAS (DGPS)capable receivers gives a better prediction though removal of atmospheric error. there are other ways to reduce error but I doubt the iphone is all that sophisticated and if the picture was indoors there should have been better investigation and a judge should not have signed a search warrant on evidence stated in the article.
Once again I will act amazed that nobody has yet set up a booby trap house designed to take out an entire SWAT team.
It might be the father of a family terrorized, half naked with guns to their head by screaming men, their dog shot in front of small children, holes torn in their walls and ceiling, the contents of their kitchen dumped in a pile; or it might be a nasty drug dealer seeking revenge for lost revenue.
It doesn’t matter. The result would be the same. But it would not end with the disaster itself. While some voices would declare it the end result of police excess, others would scream that it just proved how important it was to have SWAT teams kicking down doors, and how it should be done more often, and with more violence.
Is it really necessary? The purpose of SWAT raids was to attack heavily armed and violent criminals holed up in houses, willing to fight to the death. But such incidences are pretty rare, if you think about it. So what does a SWAT team do the rest of the time?
Maybe it is time to rethink the whole activity.
Thanks for the info. I’ve never noticed a problem with reflected signals, but then I’ve never looked. I’ve also had pretty good luck with a signal from a typical suburban frame house. Multi-story city buildings, not so much.
Map correlation remains a significant source of error when deriving Lat Long coordinates from street addresses. So we have at least two reasons to question metadata.
It was an AK. You probably need to review the AK recognition training poster,
You’re right, I forgot....if it’s a rubber band gun it’s an AK.
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