> If you'd like to take a shot at it, feel free to try to convince me that I should be concerned about warrantless GPS tracking of subject cars.
Without a warrant, you open the door to them being used for harassment. For example, by people who have videotaped police brutality and the like can be followed around in ways that would be impractical otherwise. With a warrant, they at least have to justify their use and it would create a paper trail that would document any abuse of power.
I think it's an interesting technology (though the devices are way too conspicuous if anyone goes looking...) and I see no reason to ban them. But I think there's a long enough history of bad apples in the police department abusing things such that we should be very careful about giving out grants of unchecked power. Today it's a GPS. Tomorrow, they might plant cameras or other devices, saying they didn't need a warrant for the GPS, so they shouldn't need one for any other device.
Sure, they've always been able to just tail you with no warrant, but that required more of an investment of their time, which limits how badly (and covertly) it could be abused. With technology removing these limits, the potential for abuses widens, and so it's reasonable to ask them to justify its use.
If a warrant is too burdensome for whatever reason, I could at least be satisfied if someone was required to articulate the reason for its use and submit that paperwork to the courts, without requiring their approval, prior to attaching the device, so that they would have someone watching over their shoulder for abuse without impeding all the legitimate uses of this technology. But I see no reason to grant them unchecked power.
Please don't misinterpret this as implying that all cops can't be trusted or something like that, though. I've known good cops. I lived in a small town and pretty much the whole force looked after us after something terrible happened. But I also know what happens when things go wrong; I've seen the recordings of corrupt cops and the brutality videos. I just think there's a happy medium where we check for abuse without tying the hands of the honest cops who are trying to protect us.
*... can be followed around in ways that would be impractical otherwise. With a warrant, they at least have to justify their use and it would create a paper trail that would document any abuse of power."
This is a key point. The problem isn't so much that certain things are done under legitimate circumstances, but that they sometimes happen under dubious or plainly immoral circumstances.
Introducing some friction to the process means there's essentially no significant barrier to doing it but it's still not entirely cost-free; there's some overhead involved making it less likely to happen nilly-willy and increasing the changes that improper action will be caught by some oversight.
I agree, but why are we adding friction to this thing?
By all means lets make it harder for the FBI to get access to Internet traffic, or to telephone logs.
But generally, if the FBI believes it has a car it wants to follow, I'd like them to be able to do that as effectively, cheaply, and safely as possible.
Friction can be a good thing, but I don't think we should add it everywhere just for the sake of it. And remember, one consequence of friction is that it wears things down. The court that says "yes" to hundreds or thousands of GPS tagging requests is more likely to say "yes" to the next search warrant request too; we'd have constructed a system where the "yes" corresponds with the base rate.
By all means lets make it harder for the FBI to get access to Internet traffic, or to telephone logs.
But generally, if the FBI believes it has a car it wants to follow, I'd like them to be able to do that as effectively, cheaply, and safely as possible.
I don't see that great a difference between my Internet traffic or phone logs and my daily whereabouts (i.e. my travel traffic and my physical location logs).
Good point about the debasing of saying 'yes' to things; it might end up like the permission system in Windows 7 where you get asked for permission for damn near everything to the point one starts clicking "OK" without thinking.
But having zero friction for trailing anyone, anytime, is also a problem.
True, there's friction there. The problem I have is more with the lack of accountability, even to see who authorized it after the fact. All it takes is one stalker type with access to these and they can follow their ex around all day, every day.
I think someone else hit the nail on the head elsewhere when they said that they wouldn't be comfortable with their neighbors doing this. I think that's relevant, because it exposes that normal people do see a privacy interest in having someone follow you around, whatever the law may currently say about the existence or non-existence thereof. Maybe it's not a reasonable expectation, but that doesn't seem right to me, even if our privacy is steadily decreasing.
Without a warrant, you open the door to them being used for harassment. For example, by people who have videotaped police brutality and the like can be followed around in ways that would be impractical otherwise. With a warrant, they at least have to justify their use and it would create a paper trail that would document any abuse of power.
I think it's an interesting technology (though the devices are way too conspicuous if anyone goes looking...) and I see no reason to ban them. But I think there's a long enough history of bad apples in the police department abusing things such that we should be very careful about giving out grants of unchecked power. Today it's a GPS. Tomorrow, they might plant cameras or other devices, saying they didn't need a warrant for the GPS, so they shouldn't need one for any other device.
Sure, they've always been able to just tail you with no warrant, but that required more of an investment of their time, which limits how badly (and covertly) it could be abused. With technology removing these limits, the potential for abuses widens, and so it's reasonable to ask them to justify its use.
If a warrant is too burdensome for whatever reason, I could at least be satisfied if someone was required to articulate the reason for its use and submit that paperwork to the courts, without requiring their approval, prior to attaching the device, so that they would have someone watching over their shoulder for abuse without impeding all the legitimate uses of this technology. But I see no reason to grant them unchecked power.
Please don't misinterpret this as implying that all cops can't be trusted or something like that, though. I've known good cops. I lived in a small town and pretty much the whole force looked after us after something terrible happened. But I also know what happens when things go wrong; I've seen the recordings of corrupt cops and the brutality videos. I just think there's a happy medium where we check for abuse without tying the hands of the honest cops who are trying to protect us.