Ah.
The St. Pete Times asks the age-old question.
Should authorities need a warrant to put a GPS tracking device on your car?
(...)
"We do utilize GPS for investigations, and we do have a policy that addresses the usage," wrote Hillsborough sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter in an e-mail. "But we cannot release the policy due to the fact that it reveals investigative techniques."
Procedure that was actually upheld by the courts.
Enter Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
(...)
"The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory," he wrote in a widely read dissent.
(...)
He wrote that there seems to be no limit to what technologies the government can use to violate privacy.
He noted that in 2009 a Sprint Nextel official revealed that the company gave its customers' cell phone locations to the government more than 8 million times that year. The company said that it was all done legally and that the number of customers affected was far less.
"By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy," wrote the judge, "the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives. …
"There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior."
Yep.
Could not have put it better myself.
While I'm off checking beneath my car, check out the commentary beneath the above article.
Priceless.
