Battle Brews Over FBI's Warrantless GPS Tracking | Hacker News Reader

Battle Brews Over FBI's Warrantless GPS Tracking

wired.com

53 pointsgrellas31 comments

Step 1: Place GPS tracking device on every car (alternatives include demand GPS tracking devices be built into cars by manufacturers or build them into license plates as part of a move to save money on toll collections).

Step 2: Analyze data algorithmically, looking for suspicious correlations.

Step 3: 1984.

Another thought: If you don't need a warrant to place GPS tracking device on a car, you ought to be able to obtain location tracking data from a telephone company without a warrant. Wherever your phone goes, the FBI is simply following you with a virtual agent.

I frequently encounter people who insist that the US style government, while not perfect, is the greatest form of government, and they question how much room for improvement there really is. And yet, when issues such as increased surveillance arise, everyone is (mostly rightly) alarmed at the increase in power this could provide to the government. Cries of "1984" are an internet staple. But rather than only insisting that this new capability be denied to our government, I wish people would also question whether it is really a fundamental truth that government cannot be trusted with such capabilities or whether it's possibly just our current forms of government that cannot.

Just in case it's not obvious why we'd want a government spying on us, I'll briefly make the case. There might be some side benefit, such as automatically identifying emergency situations, but realistically the main benefit comes from increased effectiveness of law enforcement. Yes, that ought to be a benefit. If it isn't, that points to a problem with the laws or the way they're enforced. Increasing the effectiveness with which we can identify violations will not only lead to a reduction in violations, but will also let us lower punishments (speeding tickets would work fine at $10 each if every speeder were cited, etc).

Some people will argue that such a government could never exist. "Who watches the watchers?", the cliche goes. Well, why couldn't the answer be "other watchers"? Isn't that the idea of checks and balances? I don't think that there's much chance of a sufficiently better form of government emerging from our current political machine anytime soon, but if it were to happen it wouldn't be accomplished by getting everyone to agree on the details, many of which I probably imagine wrong myself. Rather, I think it would be accomplished by making the very idea of a better system of government popular, and getting people to agree on a transparent process and criteria for working out the details. (Well, there might be other ways. If someone posted instructions for a relatively easy to make, low cost nuclear bomb to the internet I think that, after a few detonations, we'd have mass internment that would give everyone ample free time to discuss whether a surveillance state is really necessarily bad.)

In software development, I am cynical of any tool, language, or process that promises to somehow make a team of ineffective programmers produce software of value. However, given a team of developers with some sort of baseline competence, I strongly believe that some tools increase their effectiveness while others hold them back.

Translating this to forms of government, I conjecture that if we elect ineffective and/or untrustworthy officials, and if enough untrustworthy persons obtain power in unelected positions, I doubt there is any system that can somehow prevent them from doing bad things. But given a certain critical mass of honesty and effectiveness in the people placed in charge, some forms of government provide superior results to others.

I am not going to say that America has the greatest form of government here, but is it possible that what we have here is a people problem, not a government problem?

I'm not sure I understand to which of my musings your conjecture is directed. Are you saying that without sufficiently many honest and competent people we cannot have great government because we need those people to run the government or to choose it? I think you're saying the former and also maybe taking the position that all we really need to do to fix the present situation is to elect enough honest and competent people. I don't fully agree with either of those points (I think there are ways we could employ technology that would greatly mitigate the damage caused by incompetence or malice of government officials), but also I'd point out that the common failure of our current system of government to get honest and competent candidates elected is itself a failure of government that has room for improvement.

This is very well said. I'm reminded of the cliche that the people get the government they deserve. And boy, have we got ours in the United States. As long as the majority remains lazy and ignorant, the successful politicians will be mostly power-seekers, narcissists or agents of industry.

I can't speak to American politics, but it is with shame that I report that here in Canada, ourMinister of State for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear, refuses to confirm that he believes in evolution:

    I'm not going to answer that question. I am a
    Christian, and I don't think anybody asking
    a question about my religion is appropriate.

Well, gosh, asking the Minister of State for Science and Technology to discuss his belief in Science is asking him about his religion. And here's the rub: This was widely reported and we Canadians sent this team back into office for another four years with a majority.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article320476.e...

Can I really blame Mr. Goodyear? Or our system? Or should Canadians have a good, hard look at themselves in the mirror?

That position could be dominant because of a relatively small minority of Canadians who feel strongly about creationism who will actually vote on that issue.

Agreed. Or to put it another way, that party could have been elected because the majority of people who bothered to vote were apathetic about the qualifications and bias of the Minister of State for Science and Technology and what implications that might have for funding science and industry.

Agreed it seems a totally Orwellian path for the authorities to be able to track anyone they want without a warrant. Who watches the watchers? http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_p...

I keep getting reminded of the character in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky who said something like:

"Any ubiquitous computing environment where local nodes have to run government code will inevitably become an absolute tyranny."

OnStar has been tracking GM vehicles for a long time. I bet Microsoft Sync does tracking for Ford cars now too. Then of course there's LoJack for fleet vehicles etc.

Sure, and of course my phone company knows which cell tower I'm using. Starbucks knows where the device with a certain MAC address that signs in with my account has been. That's not the point, though - the question is, will the government has easy access to that data and will they use it for anything and everything?

To me, the interesting question would be, were a private citizen to build a tracking device and attach it to an FBI vehicle, would they have a problem with that? My guess is they would arrest you and figure out something to charge you with -- even though, by their own logic, since you could follow an FBI vehicle around to see where it goes, attaching a GPS is equivalent.

A logical standard would be "that which isn't legal for a private citizen to do, the police need a warrant for" -- but hey, I'm an engineer, not a lawyer...

The FBI, as an institution, can't feel shame or embarassment. But individuals employed by the FBI can feel shame. Don't they? Are all FBI agents who do this kind of un-american activity sociopaths, or do some of them feel ashamed at underminging a free society?

But the upper levels of authority at the FBI, they must all be pervets who like to snoop on people. Shame on them for doing this un-american, unnatural voyeurism.

I think you'd be surprised by how much people can rationalize when unemployment is near 10% and they're looking forward to an early retirement with a civil service pension.

I don't feel that people are generally good or evil - they are simply self-serving. I have no doubt that the people involved in this sort of activity have thought about what they're doing, but at the end of the day it comes down to the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense:

"I have a mortgage to pay."

It's not just the FBI - this argument has been used by Wall Street bankers peddling sketchy derivatives, dishonest car salesmen, and programmers writing code that will be used to screw customers.

I suspect many law enforcement people take the attitude that if someone hasn't done anything wrong, they have nothing to hide, and if they have done something wrong, they should be brought to justice. Also, the use of electronic surveillance doesn't normally inconvenience a law-abiding person, but it can help catch dangerous criminals.

I think that warrantless electronic surveillance very clearly violates USA Citizen's presumption of innocence and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It's fishing, plain and simple. The FBI knows what a warrant is, they should go get one. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, that's what they'd tell a non-FBI person.

I think they are fishing for wrongdoing, and it's a waste of taxpayer money, and a shameful act.Shame on you, FBI. You're acting like perverts.

> I suspect many law enforcement people take the attitude that if someone hasn't done anything wrong, they have nothing to hide, and if they have done something wrong, they should be brought to justice. Also, the use of electronic surveillance doesn't normally inconvenience a law-abiding person, but it can help catch dangerous criminals.

I wonder what defenses the HHS people will use.

How about the people in the NSA who spied on their wives, and listened to strangers talking dirty? Some people simply don't have class or shame, and thinking of my own workplace, I people I would trust with that kind of power and those whom I would not.

> How about the people in the NSA who spied on their wives, and listened to strangers talking dirty?

However, we know that the folks in HHS will not do such things, right?

If it goes before the current supreme court, the country is screwed, they will rule it legal and then it will be "settled law" for decades to come.

Few warrants are ever turned down at every level of law enforcement (feds have 100% approval apparently) why do they endanger any case they may have by skipping a warrant? Is it ego? Is it laziness?

If your referring to the 100% approval article posted today, that was about the FISA court. The FISA court is interesting in a lot of ways, one of which is that surveillance can be conducted first (i.e. without a warrant), and the warrant can be applied for up to 72 hours after the fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...

data mining. it's hard to justify 300 million warrants.

Too late... Carnivore, Echelon, etc...

Electronic tracking is a very cheap way to gain a lot of possibly useful information about potential suspects. It thus allows government to keep us safe without spending a lot of money. There are only two downsides.

First, innocent people may be singled out to be tracked without having done anything wrong. However, tracking, by itself, does not negatively impact the life of the person being tracked. Most are completely unaware of it, and those that are aware that they are being tracked have nothing to complain about: there is no expectation of privacy while traveling on public roads. And, as the technology gets cheaper, more people will get tracked, making the "singling out" less significant. When everyone is tracked, no one will be singled out.

The second downside to electronic tracking is that it vastly increases the power of government. But most people view this as a good thing. A more powerful government can keep us safer. If it can do it cheaply, so much the better.

First, "most people view this as a good thing" is clearly an appeal to popularity, which is a fallacious reasoning. At one time, most people believed slavery was a good thing. Discuss.

"A more powerful government can keep us safer." The word "can" is a weasel-word. We are not debating whether the government "can" do something, we are debating whether they actually do something. I challenge you to strengthen your statement by claiming that the increase in power given to the government is actually keeping us safer.

"if it can do it cheaply, so much the better." Hanging around startups, I have become enamoured of the idea that when certain things become extremely cheap, the entire dynamic changes. Radio car phones existed when I was a teen-ager. Then analog cell-phones, then digital cell-phones. Each new wave of technology was cheaper than the previous one. At some point, untethered phones became so cheap that the entire dynamic around telephony changed, and it changed very quickly.

Getting back to cheap spying on people, if you like what they are doing, then doing it cheaper seems to be a good thing. But at some point, it becomes so cheap that the entire dynamic changes. For example, if these devices were so cheap that they could be disposable, why not spy on everyone, all of the time?

This completely changes the dynamic of law enforcement. You don't start with a person suspected of breaking the law and spy on them, you simply spy on everyone and save everything. When and if you become interested in someone, you open up their file and voila! All of their movements since they bought their first car, all of their rental car movements, all of the movements of everyone who knew them and might have given them a ride, going back decades.

I need a bit more meat to the assertion that this scenario is "so much the better" before I will accept it.

At one time, most people believed slavery was a good thing. Discuss.

This may be true for some places and times, but societies that practiced slavery commonly suffered from the demographic problem that the slaves outnumbered their masters (and other freemen). That is to say, most people were slaves.

When and if you become interested in someone, you open up their file and voila!

The file is just data. That data can be used to establish the guilt of the guilty or the innocence of the innocent. It can also be used to make cool looking graphs and heatmaps to post on your blog, improve the flow of traffic, better design cars and cities, tax emissions, target advertisements, set insurance rates, get you laid, etc.

It's not that I disagree with you, but I think with time we need more specificity as to what the onerous scenarios are. Is the collection of that data the problem, or is it the collection of that data directly by law enforcement that bothers us? Is it the collection or is it the ease with which they do it? Is it the access to that data by law enforcement or the potential for abuse, misuse, and falsely convicting the innocent? And so on.

To take it in the more general direction: When exactly does more and better data become a bad thing? When exactly is the ambiguity in our lives sacred enough to shield against the tide of data and the changing dynamics that enable it?

America in 1860 may have been one of those places and times where most people believed slavery was a good thing:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm

Total Free Population 27,489,561 Total Slave Population 3,953,760 Grand Total 31,443,321

The freemen outnumbered the slaves in all but two states. And in any event, nobody asked the slaves.

As for the file being "just" data, so is a picture of a man with his mistress, or an email conversation, or a list of the books you purchased online, or a list of URLs you visited this year. You tell me: Is this all just "data?"

Are you good with the FBI/CSIS having all this stuff about you or any other citizen who is not being investigated with cause? I'm not, and furthermore I won't be tricked into some kind of reverse onus where I have to explain why it's a bad thing for the government to have this data just for the sake of having all this data. It's the other way around: The government should have to tell us, the people, why it needs this data. If it can't justify the collection of this data, it shouldn't collect it.

The reason why the onus is upon the government to prove why it needs the data and not on us to prove why we're entitled to some privacy is because humans have an unbroken track record for abusing information about each other, and governments even more so. To argue that somehow 2011 it is all going to be different is to argue that this month will be full of Sundays or that pigs have finally taken flight with their new wings.

Chattel slaves. Wage slaves. What's the difference? Discuss.

As long as a pig thinks his farmer wants him to live a long and happy life, the walls of the pigpen seem like defenses against enemies, not the elements of a prison. The reason I'm uncomfortable with government surveillance is that I see it not as a way for a good government to keep me safe, but as a way for an evil government to watch me.

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