The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS

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 can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

If you have a cell phone with the built in GPS tracking system for billing and linkage, you could be monitored on a regular basis:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gps-data/

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Feds ‘Pinged’ Sprint GPS Data 8 Million Times Over a Year:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data more than 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009, according to a company manager who disclosed the statistic at a non-public interception and wiretapping conference in October.

The manager also revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed web portal that Sprint provides law enforcement to conduct automated “pings” to track users. Through the website, authorized agents can type in a mobile phone number and obtain global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the phone.

The revelations, uncovered by blogger and privacy activist Christopher Soghoian, have spawned questions about the number of Sprint customers who have been under surveillance, as well as the legal process agents followed to obtain such data.

But a Sprint Nextel spokesman said that Soghoian, who recorded the Sprint manager’s statements at the closed conference, misunderstood what the figure represents. The number of customers whose GPS data was provided to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies was much less than 8 million, as was the total number of individual requests for data.

The spokesman wouldn’t disclose how many of Sprint’s 48 million customers had their GPS data shared, or indicate the number of unique surveillance requests from law enforcement. But he said that a single surveillance order against a lone target could generate thousands of GPS “pings” to the cell phone, as the police track the subject’s movements over the course of days or weeks. That, Sprint claims, is the source of the 8 million figure: it’s the cumulative number of times Sprint cell phones covertly reported their location to law enforcement over the year.

The spokesman also said that law enforcement agents have to obtain a court order for the data, except in special emergency circumstances.

The information about the data requests and portal comes from Paul Taylor, manager of Sprint’s Electronic Surveillance Team. He made the revelations at the Intelligent Support Systems (ISS) conference, a surveillance industry gathering for law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the companies that provide them with the technologies and capabilities to conduct surveillance.

The conference is closed to press, but Soghoian, who is a graduate student at Indiana University, obtained entry and recorded a couple of panel sessions, which he posted on his blog (see below). In one of the recordings, Taylor is heard saying that the automated web system was rolled out a year ago and that in 13 months it had processed more than 8 million requests for GPS data from law enforcement.

“We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests,” Taylor is heard saying. “So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy.”

Soghoian concluded on his blog that the quote provided proof that “location requests easily outnumber wiretaps, and … likely outnumber all other forms of surveillance request too.”

The dire predictions of the ancient Mayans are based on their study and observation of sun cycles. Its no accident that they predicted what has now come to be known as Solar Cycle 24.

However, the effects of Solar cycle 24 are debatable.And when the prediction is supposed to occur is also open to interpretation. Some say 2012, some say 2013, others say not at all this millenium, according to the base settings of the Mayan Calandar array according to present astronomical charts, which are arbitrary, based on a set of assumptions not based on pure science.

Much of the cogent discussion can be seen at :

http://www.solarcycle24.com

or you can google into NASA’s site to read scientific details.

The nearest black hole, is 1600 light years light years away (associated with a visable star V 4641), and there is no observed possibility of one developing in the immediate region of our galaxy. We are well out on the spiral arms of it.Black holes develope more readily and with greater frequency towards the center of our galaxy.To have a black whole in our vicinity would require our intersection with another galaxy, a readily observable astronomical pheomenon which is not happening.

IMHO, life on earth will not end anytime soon, as much as some might think so. However a radiation zap is possible.
For a period of several weeks , people might be well advised to limit their direct exposure outdoors.

As far as the government tracking one with GPS. We have the option of not usng cell phones,or purchasing a sevice in which the tracking option can be trurned on or off, or the tracking chip on some phones can be removed or bypassed.It is also possible to put a second cell phone in service which has a tacking device while one uses the phone without. The tracked phone can be put anywhere you want, you can even lend it to someone.Stray dogs love to carry them in a collar pack. GPS cell phone tracking is completely unreliable, except for the uninformed who do not guard against it.

We refuse to use them in our family, and would do so only for emergency rescue purposes, if we were going to sea or into the wilderness, and would use a sat phone.

https://ssd.eff.org/wire/protect/cell-tracking

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