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Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentally threatening our freedom on the open road. You may have seen the recent New York Times op-ed that admonished us to start referring to our mobile devices as “trackers” instead of “phones.” Perhaps as ALPR technology spreads we should start saying “tracker” in place of “car,” too. We need statutory protections to limit the collection, retention,...

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...

Note: The following text is a quote: Eight Area Men Sentenced on Federal Racketeering Charges Involving Conspiracy to Transfer Cash and Checks to the Palestinian Territories ST. LOUIS, MO—The United States Attorney’s office announced today that eight members of a criminal enterprise operating out of five St. Louis area convenience stores have been sentenced on charges of federal racketeering or related charges. As far back as 2000, the RICO conspiracy has involved bank fraud, receipt of stolen property, conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business, purchasing contraband cigarettes for resale, evading reporting requirement on exporting monetary instruments, and transporting monetary instruments...

By Jay Baggett © 2009 WorldNetDaily You can run, but you cannot hide ... and if you try, one push of a button will cause a lethal poison to immediately begin flowing through your body. That's the Orwellian future a Saudi inventor was seeking to bring to Germany until that nation's patent office announced last week it was rejecting his request to patent what has been dubbed the "Killer Chip." The tiny semiconductor device is intended to be surgically implanted or injected into the body, according to the patent application, for the purpose of tracking visitors from other nations by...

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police violated the Constitution when they attached a Global Positioning System tracker to a suspect's vehicle without a valid search warrant, voting unanimously in one of the first major cases to test privacy rights in the digital era. The decision offered a glimpse of how the court may address the flood of privacy cases expected in coming years over issues such as cellphones, email and online documents. But the justices split 5-4 over the reasoning, suggesting that differences remain over how to apply age-old principles prohibiting "unreasonable searches." The minority pushed for a more...

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...

SAN FRANCISCO – Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage. The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it. Two days later, FBI agents arrived at Afifi's Santa Clara apartment and demanded the return of their property — a global positioning system tracking device now at the center of a raging...

A new ruling says that--in most cases--government and law agencies don't need a search warrant to track cell phones.Tuesday a federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled that--in most cases--the FBI and other police agencies do not need a search warrant in order to track the location of cell phones used by Americans. The three-judge panel of the Third Circuit sided with the Obama Administration (pdf) in the belief that a signed search warrant--one based on a probable cause to suspect criminal activity--isn't necessary when obtaining logs from wireless carriers that depict the whereabouts of a cell phone. However the panel...

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...

Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPSBy ADAM LIPTAK Published: September 10, 2011 WASHINGTON — The precedent is novel. More precisely, the precedent is a novel. In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984” to sound an alarm. They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described. **SNIP** Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn turned down...

It seems that the police, at least in Wisconsin, can attach a GPS tracking device to a car for any reason or no reason at all. No warrant or any level of suspicion is required. The case does not appear to be erroneously decided, and should withstand further review. It’s time for the captains of industry to develop a reasonably priced product that can disable such devices attached to cars.

…and there was much (UNANIMOUS!) rejoicing: Justices say GPS tracker violated privacy rights: The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days. But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties...

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.

In a case that stemmed from an investigation by D.C. police and the FBI of a local drug dealer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that police across the country need a warrant if they want to track suspects using GPS monitors. In the ruling, which was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court found that even though the case involved a GPS unit that was attached to a car that was out in the open, it still constituted a "search" under the language of the Fourth Amendment: It is important to be clear about what occurred in this...

Two key memos outlining the Justice Department’s views about when Americans can be surreptitiously tracked with GPS technology are being kept secret by the department despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU to force their release. The FBI’s general counsel discussed the existence of the two memos publicly last year, yet the Justice Department is refusing to release them without huge redactions. (You can see the heavily censored versions sent to the ACLU here and here, and our original FOIA request here.) The Justice Department’s unfortunate decision leaves Americans with no clear understanding of when we...

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police cannot put a GPS device on a suspect's car to track his movements without a warrant. The high court ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration. The high court ruled that placement of a device on a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements was covered by U.S. constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures of evidence. A majority of the court acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives....

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government...

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...

A 20-year-old college student in California said he was shocked to discover he has been followed by the FBI when earlier this week he found a GPS tracker placed underneath his car. Yasir Afifi, a half-Egyptian, half-American Muslim and U.S. citizen, said he was having the oil changed on his car last Sunday at a Santa Clara, Calif., auto shop when he noticed a wire and the black device underneath the automobile as it was being raised. "I was born here in Santa Clara, I just turned 20 last August. I'm a sales manager, we sell laptops and I'm a...