Free Republic

In 1991, George Holliday filmed the LAPD’s arrest and beating of Rodney King. The videotape provoked national controversy. If a similar incident happened today, it might provoke something else: the arrest of George Holliday. Cell phones and cameras with video-recording capability have become ubiquitous. This has led to an increase in the filming of police officers, which has led to a backlash: Cops have begun arresting those who film them, on charges such as interfering with an investigation—even when the filmer is not interfering and the officer is not investigating. In one now-famous example, motorcyclist Anthony Graber’s helmet cam was...

We partnered with Wired to bring you a peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. The device is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car. If you're curious where this one came from, Wired has posted a writeup about Karen Thomas, the woman who found this tracker under her car. They've also posted a video of Kyle doing the teardown. The device comprises of a GPS unit for receiving the car's position, an RF transmitter for relaying your location to the interested authority (aka the FBI), and a set of sweet D-cell batteries that power the whole enchilada....

Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves. FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually...

South Carolina legislators moved closer to overriding the governor's veto of a bill allowing officers to search people on probation or parole without a warrant. The Senate on Wednesday voted 36-7 to override Gov. Mark Sanford's veto. It now goes to the House. The measure allows officers to bypass going to a judge for a warrant before searching a probationer or parolee on the street. Their vehicles and any possession could also be searched. Inmates would have to sign off on the searches before they're released. If they don't agree, they could stay in prison for their full term. Sanford...

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just decided that it was legal for the police to put a GPS tracking device on your car, sitting in your driveway, on your property. Here's how to protect yourself.Matt's post about the decision explains in depth about the ruling. To quickly summarize, the supreme court had said before that police can look through things that anyone in the public could come across, meaning, your driveway is freely accessible to the public, hence, the cops can look through it. The 9th circuit court now says that cops can shove a GPS locator onto your car, because the area is publicly...

WASHINGTON – Citizens traveling public highways should have no expectation of privacy just because police are tracking their movements through GPS rather than in person, the U.S. government argued Tuesday in a case before the Supreme Court that pits the interest of law enforcement against individual privacy rights. The dispute springs from a situation in which police affixed a GPS tracking device to a suspect's car without a proper warrant. It monitored the suspect's movements for several weeks, noting where his vehicle went and how long it stayed at each location. While much of the data was ultimately excluded as...

Fifth District Ohio Appeals Court ruling meant to influence higher courts against allowing warrantless GPS vehicle tracking. Although the US Supreme Court is expected to settle the issue of GPS tracking of motorists soon, a three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals, Fifth District ruled 2-1 earlier this month against the warrantless use of the technology. The majority's decision was likely designed to influence the deliberations of the higher courts. On November 8, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the GPS case US v. Jones. The Ohio Supreme Court is also considering Ohio v. Johnson in...

You might think that police or other federal authorities would need to obtain a court order to be able to place a GPS tracking device on your vehicle. That court order is apparently not needed according to the Obama administration. This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled last year that attaching GPS devices to the vehicles of citizens amounted to search protected by the Constitution.

It's okay for the government to plant a GPS tracker on the car parked in your driveway, tracking everywhere you go. It doesn't violate your rights, at all—according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California, Arizona, Oregon and a bunch of the western US, has ruled that the government did nothing wrong when the DEA planted a GPS tracking device on Juan Pineda-Moreno's Jeep, which was parked in his driveway—without a search warrant. The underpinning for the ruling is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in...

"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. " ---Fourth Amendment to the Constitution "Fourth Amendment? Never heard of it."--The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals The Circus has ruled that the gov't has a right to track you anywhere you go with GPS (planted by them) without a warrant. I am not making this...

Police are allowed in some circumstances to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant, a federal judge said yesterday. CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission -- and without a warrant -- to install multiple "covert digital surveillance cameras" in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana plants were being grown. This is the latest case to highlight how advances in technology are causing the legal system to rethink how Americans' privacy rights are protected...

The NYPD is amassing a database of cell phone users, instructing cops to log serial numbers from suspects' phones in hopes of connecting them to past or future crimes. In the era of disposable, anonymous cell phones, the file could be a treasure-trove for detectives investigating drug rings and other criminal enterprises, police sources say. "It's used to help build cases," one source said of the new initiative. "It doesn't replace the human element, like debriefing prisoners, but it's another tool to use that we didn't have in the past." A recent internal memo says that when cops make an...

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker." Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest. Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it's not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal in response...

In its relentless never-ending quest for more power to track and follow American citizens through their cellphones, the Department of Justice (DoJ) requested last week that Congress give them easier access to location data stored by cellphone service providers. Jason Weinstein, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, argued that requiring a search warrant to gain such access would “cripple” his department’s efforts to investigate crime and criminals. Said Weinstein, There is really no fairness and no justice when the law applies differently to different people depending on which courthouse you’re sitting in. For that...

The ACLU has released documents that show that in the last two years the US Department of Justice has conducted more warrantless electronic surveillance, involving spying on telephones, email and Facebook accounts, than in the preceding decade. The American Civil Liberties and Union (ACLU) reports that the documents handed over after months of litigation include the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports covering use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The documents, according to the ACLU, shows a sharp increase in the use of surveillance tools such as telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The ACLU observed...

A Justice Department document obtained by the ACLU of Northern California shows that federal investigators were routinely using a sophisticated cell phone tracking tool known as a "stingray," but hiding that fact from federal magistrate judges when asking for permission to do so. Stingrays and similar devices essentially impersonate cell phone towers, allowing them to pinpoint the precise location of targeted cell phones (even inside people's homes) and intercept conversations. They also sweep up the data of innocent people who happen to be nearby. By withholding information about this technology from courts in applications for electronic surveillance orders, the federal...

Big Brother has been outsourced. The police can find out where you are, where you’ve been, even where you’re going. All thanks to that handy little human tracking device in your pocket: your cellphone.  There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering...

THIS spring was a rough season for the Fourth Amendment. The Obama administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow GPS tracking of vehicles without judicial permission. The Supreme Court ruled that the police could break into a house without a search warrant if, after knocking and announcing themselves, they heard what sounded like evidence being destroyed. Then it refused to see a Fourth Amendment violation where a citizen was jailed for 16 days on the false pretext that he was being held as a material witness to a crime. In addition, Congress renewed Patriot Act provisions on enhanced surveillance powers...

Now if a gun is fired, police will be able to know where that gun went off within 25 meters and property managers around here say it has already started to bring some extra security. The ShotSpotter System has been in Springfield for four years but this is an expansion that is already getting results. “The concerns are going to be there but not as much, if you see the data on crime now in the North End it has declined,” said Maria Perez from the North End of Springfield. By getting to the locations faster, police say they have...

Lots of people like to think of government as a black hole that sucks in tax dollars and allows nothing of value to emerge. They haven’t taken a look at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This secretive research arm of the Defense Department has a unique mission: to embrace the most wide-eyed visions of the future and manifest them in the here and now. Founded in 1958 as a shocked and fearful response to Russia‘s launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Darpa has over 45 years racked up a consistent record of innovation that has utterly transformed contemporary...