Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV

<i>He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security.</i><p>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.

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.

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.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

<i>He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security</i><p>So one guy gets GPS'd because of a vague tip and the other guy because his cousin might be a drug dealer. Yikes.

Two inevitable events that will bring this situation to a head:<p>1. Citizens start throwing these devices into large bodies of water.<p>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.

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.

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.

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?

Single page view: <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-t...</a>

Out of curiosity, would something like this render the problem moot? <a href="http://www.meritline.com/super-mini-cigarette-lighter-gps-blocker-black---p-65208.aspx?source=fghdac" rel="nofollow">http://www.meritline.com/super-mini-cigarette-lighter-gps-bl...</a>

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

Land of the free, indeed.

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

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).<p>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.<p>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).

Presumably if you discover a suspect package under your vehicle you would call the fire service and the bomb squad.<p>(Then quietly also call the local news service.)

<i>driving a Crown Victoria with tinted windows.</i><p>Well, the GPS thing might be up for debate, but tinted front side windows are illegal in CA. :-)

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