Stathol wrote:
Reasonable suspicion that can be articulated in court is all I'm asking for. If they have that, obtaining a warrant shouldn't be an issue.
Reasonable suspicion is not the same as probable cause. You need probable cause to obtain a warrant, the same as to make an arrest. Reasonable suspicion is less than that, but it is higher than mere suspicion; in other words you must be able to articulate in court the facts and circumstances that gave you a reasonable suspicion. Not just "He looked suspicious" but "He was wearing a long heavy coat when it was 90 degrees out, plus a hat and dark glasses and he'd been outside that gas station for 15 minutes doing nothing".
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Furthermore, A) no is asking for approval in the court of public opinion -- just in a court of law. What "people here" think isn't relevant.
I realize you may not be, but a great many people here are- specifically their personal opinion and suspicions.
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B) It's not as though obtaining a warrant before deploying this technology is some insurmountable obstacle that brings law enforcement to a grinding halt anymore than requiring a warrant before a wiretap. Hell, this technology wasn't even available until recently, so you're going to have a hard time convincing me that law enforcement needs this technology so badly (and immediately!) that waiting for warrant is some terrible imposition.
No one claimed any such thing. However, the fact that it's a new application of technology also does not mean that we suddenly need to impose a requirement for warrants just because it's not a terrible imposition - which it is (on the technology, not on law enforcement in general). This technology is something you would use to obtain the information needed to get a warrant; once you had one it would serve little purpose.
We don't have warrants for investigation; we have warrants for search and arrest. GPS does neither, so it should not require one, unless a search or something functionally equivalent is performed in the process of emplacing it.
Diamondeye wrote:
Technically, as long as you don't impersonate a police officer or pretend to be an agent of the municipality in question, it wouldn't be illegal to issue someone a traffic ticket as a private citizen -- it would just be silly and unenforceable.
Aside rom the fact that detaining them to do so in the first place would constitute abduction.
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With respect to arrests, I don't think the difference is a huge as you think it is. For municipal violations, private citizens probably can't legally pull someone over, because it's a municipal matter, not a criminal one, and they aren't an agent authorized by the municipality to enforce their traffic codes. But then, they can't enforce traffic rules for 3rd-party private entities, either. They can, however, attempt to enforce their own private traffic/parking rules on their own private property. This is exactly what private campus security does in many places, for instance. Also, while a private citizen may not be able to pull someone over for running a red light, they could certainly file a civil lawsuit akin to a municipal charge against the perpetrator. People generally don't, but they could.
I think I understand the difference far better than anyone here except maybe RD. Private tickets are simply a consequence you have to pay to continue being allowed to enjoy that private facility. You cannot issue an arrest warrant because someone didn't pay a private parking ticket or traffic ticket. On college campuses, there are often public streets running through them and tickets enforceable as such would not be issued on private property. A civil lawsuit is also not the same as a criminal charge; the two systems are separate and have different requirements especially in terms of burden of proof
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As for criminal violations, I think the difference is even smaller. In most cases, someone witnessing criminal activity can certainly detain someone until the proper authorities arrive, especially for violent crime. Non-violent crime may be a little iffy. Vandalism? Probably. Embezzlement? Unlikely.
This depends on what state you live in. You may or may not be empowered to detain someone for felonies or misdemeanors, both, or neither. There is nothing really "iffy" about it, especially since in most cases what you are talking about would really be arrest, not detention.
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But in any case, where arrest and citation powers are concerned, these have been granted for the simple reason that we all understand it would be impossible to enforce the law without them, and that requiring a warrant before these actions would utterly cripple law enforcement. Not so with the GPS transponders, as I explained above. They're nice to have, but hardly an essential component for law enforcement.
Which really has nothing to do with it, since the arguments that a warrant should be required all revolve around the idea that a GPS tracker is, in and of itself, a search, and therefore violates privacy rights and/or the 4th ammendment. It does neither, unless its method of installation is intrusive or damaging. The mere fact that something is not essential to law enforcement is not a reason a warrant should be required.
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Secondly, and more importantly, wrongful arrest is criminal. If a police officer uses their arrest powers in an unethical or unjustified way, they can be held criminally liable for it. One of the problems with this ruling vis-a-vis the GPS transponders is that it places no restrictions on their use and leaves private citizens with no recourse if their use is abused. By declaring that their use is no different than conventional observation, the police essentially don't have to answer for their use any more than they have to answer for why they deploy patrol units to one location vs. another. This is a problem.
Wrongful arrest has nothing to do with the use of GPS. More tot he point, you keep talking about "if their use is abused" and using them is not, in and of itself, abusive regardless of what the court of public opinion may think. There is no reasont eh police should have to answer for their use. This is not a problem, and for precisely the same reason that police can deploy patrol units according to tactical need; it's just a form of observation, and of information readily available to the naked eye.
When it becomes a problem is when some other device is attached which, as Raf pointed out, makes it not inherently a GPS locator anymore, or when the method of use involves something that would be a search regardless. The GPS itself does not pose any threat to either of these restrictions.
Diamondeye wrote:
I guess I was too obtuse in my previous post. The derivative of position vs. time is velocity. I'm alluding to the potential for tagging random vehicles for an automated speed citation system. This would absolutely be a cash cow. Why do you think that police departments have become so enamored with automated red-light cameras, automated speed traps, and automated toll enforcment cameras in recent years? They're a great source of revenue, while at the same time being safer than the alternative of using personnel to make traffic stops. And then, of course, there are things like catching people making illegal U-turns. That's very easy to do; even common consumer navigation devices these days know where median cuts occur, and the more sophisticated ones know speed limits, turn restrictions, and so forth. In many locations, you could even tie in to the municipal traffic control SCADA system to catch people turning right on red where it's prohibited, etc. The potential is there to realize virtually perfect traffic enforcement in most areas, save those for which present GPS is too imprecise to detect.
It's actually city halls that have become enamored of such cameras, not police departments. Police, especially unionized ones, are not fans because it means less need (theoretically) for officers. It also introduces the problem of who was driving. In any case, GPS is not precise enough for that. The GPS in your car appears that precise because it has map software in it, but it really is not; if you watch carefully when starting and stopping the speed measurement lags. GPS is really not that precise for such fine-fixed applications.
In any case, I don't know why you think perfect traffic enforcement is some sort of problem.
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But given the pace of technology and and an economy of scale, it's not unrealistic to predict that, in the very near future, it would be economical to deploy these to everyone as a requirement for operating a motor vehicle, and for the transponders to have at least 1-meter resolution. That's sufficient to automatically detect all sorts of behavior like reckless driving (weaving in-and-out traffic, following too closely, etc.), illegally driving on the shoulder, etc. Not to mention being able to highlight erratic driving strongly suggestive of DWI, and being able to dispatch an officer to the scene immediately and automatically.
Aside from the problem that the consumer and taxpayer would inevitably foot the bill for this, so what?
Diamondeye wrote:
In general, I don't think you're really grasping the full potential of this sort of data mining, and you're overestimating the technological hurdles. Systems like this are already being used both publicly and privately in various capacities. And interest is picking up among police departments to use data-mining systems for their predictive value (again, see LAPD
in this thread). All that's really needed is for someone to put all the pieces together into one package.
And the problem with this is? Until someone actually commits a crime, all this is, is predictive. No one is advocating arresting people for crimes the might commit.
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You're not looking at the bigger picture. You're only considering the narrow possibility of using position data by itself for direct arrest purposes. There are much richer and more useful purposes. First of all, let's make the simple observation that we're talking about more than just random positional blips devoid of any context. Even if the transmitters are deployed "at random", we have to assume that the police are smart to enough to write down the plates and VIN of the vehicles they attach them to, so as to know who they're monitoring.
No, I'm considering the bigger picture just fine. The problem is, the bigger picture amounts to concern that too many criminals will get arrested, and complaints that the police aren't perfect all the time. Ok, so they write down the plate and VIN. So what? All that information is at the BMV anyhow.
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Now think bigger than just random deployment. Start tagging the vehicles of known or suspected gang members. Use the data to start mapping out gang turfs in a GIS system, and use that to configure optimal patrol deployment. Analyze the data for patterns of congregation that suggest gang hideouts. Use it to determine when one gang is making incursions into another's territory to predict likely armed conflicts.
Tag drug dealers and use the data to model where specific types of drugs are going. Use the patterns to identify likely buyers and suppliers, and use this to work your way up the food chain. Use it to find out, in real-time, when known dealers are hanging out around schools, parks, etc.
The system gets even more powerful when you tie it in to property data from the local appraisal district, existing criminal records, and so forth. There's all sorts of potential uses that you're not even considering. You could see when a known armed robber (repeat offender) has been meeting frequently with known accomplices and driving around casing jewelry stores or high value homes (whatever his predilections may be, based on criminal record). It's not as good as having every citizen wearing an ankle bracelet, sure, but it still adds a wealth of data to feed automated analysis and predictive systems. This is precisely the use that you heralded as being a good idea in the thread I linked earlier; you just aren't taking the idea far enough.
Finally, there's no reason why this kind of system has to "overload" the police department with constant reports. Data that can be automatically analyzed can also be automatically filtered. My server here at work generates thousands of messages in its system log every error, but even though some of these message are indicative of warnings, or even errors, it rarely actually notifies me by sending email to the root account, or whatever. It has a sense of priorities, and can be tweaked to inform me only in those instances when I really want to be alerted. There's no reason that you couldn't do the same with real-time GIS analysis.
The situation is not that different from, say, spam analysis. Heuristic algorithms can be tweaked and adjusted with somewhat arbitrary granularity until you get exactly the sensitivity you want out of the system. Or, if you want to get really sophisticated, hook the parameters up to some kind of neural net feedback system and use a real human to train it until it learns what does and doesn't resemble a good report. Such systems have already been deployed to analyze arbitrary data like EKG readouts and identify how likely it is that the pattern represents a particular type of heart condition. The freaky part is that after adequate training, the neural nets were better at predicting the condition than expert cardiologists. Again, I don't think you realize what's really possible in the here-in-now, and more than just possible -- affordable. You would be surprised at just how much processing power is available with relatively inexpensive "off-the-shelf" hardware.
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Fantastic. You've succeeded in convincing me you could easily use this to catch a lot more criminals. Now explain why this is a problem other than "ZOMG POTENTIAL!!" "Ankle bracelet" arguments aren't going to cut it, because making people wear them is clearly an intrusion on their person in a way that attaching a GPS to their car's undercarriage is not. Ok, so the police could figure out when gang members are going to have a gunfight. This is a problem why exactly?
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