State Seeks to Expand Secret Tracking Program that Uses Cellphones, GPS

By Alexia Campbell from the Sun Sentinel:

Florida wants to expand a secret surveillance program that uses GPS cellphone tracking and other new tracking technology to help police solve violent crimes.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Electronic Surveillance Support Teams have operated under the radar since the first one launched in the Orlando area in 2007. The teams have since spread to South Florida and all across the state, records show, and rising police requests for surveillance have led the department to push for $1.7 million to expand the program.

Although little is known about how agents on these teams use the high-tech surveillance equipment to help police, state records show that locating criminal suspects with GPS locators on smartphones is a common practice.

"We prefer people not to know who they are, where they are or how they are operating," said FDLE Assistant Commissioner Jim Madden, who oversees the department's investigations.

Some secrecy is needed to ensure criminals don't outsmart investigators, Madden said. But civil liberties advocates have argued that nationwide police use of cell phone tracking technology raises legal and constitutional questions, especially when investigators act without a judge's order.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police must get a warrant from a judge before planting a GPS tracker on a car. But the ruling didn't address police use of GPS for cell phone tracking, leaving it in a gray legal area, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The threat to personal privacy presented by this technology is breathtaking," according to a recent ACLU study about the widespread police use of cell phone tracking without a warrant.

Madden said FDLE always seeks judicial approval to trail someone with GPS, but its written policy for using GPS devices instructs agents to show probable cause for criminal activity to the department's legal counsel to see if a court order is necessary.

Local law enforcement agencies made 171 requests for surveillance support from FDLE's South Florida team in fiscal year 2011-2012, the department said. It's the first year the Miami regional office has kept tabs on the numbers.

Some local police agencies who work with the surveillance and tracking teams are hesitant to describe how it works.

Hollywood Police detectives have worked with them for years, and they credit state agents with helping them hunt down murderers who might otherwise elude them, said Police Sgt. Lyle Bien, who works in the homicide unit.

"We don't have the resources or individuals trained to do this," Bien said. "Technology has gotten so good, they can pinpoint the house where a phone is located."

These type of high-tech tools helped Hollywood homicide detectives find a woman wanted for the December murder of a 69-year-old man found dead in a motel. FDLE's local surveillance team led detectives to Mary Meegan, 44, who was living at a homeless shelter in the Florida Keys.

Although state surveillance teams focus on violent crimes, they will take on some emergency cases, such as child abductions.

In February, the local team located a Delray Beach girl, 17, who was reportedly kidnapped. She texted her mother in the morning that she was being held captive in the trunk of a car.

Within a few hours, Delray Beach detectives asked FDLE's surveillance team to help find her, state records show. By 1:30 that afternoon, FDLE agents knew she was likely somewhere in the El Paraiso motel in Hialeah. They soon found her in one of the motel rooms, holed up with a young man. The teen later admitted she lied about the kidnapping to her parents so she could skip school to rendezvous with a man she met online.

Which tracking method FDLE used to find the girl is unclear, and both police and state authorities declined to discuss it.

Records show that the state surveillance teams also provide wiretapping, GPS car tracking and audio and video surveillance support. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, the Broward Sheriff's Office and Davie Police are among many local agencies who have worked with them, FDLE said.

The number of requests for surveillance help has skyrocketed in recent years, said Madden, of the FDLE. That's why he asked for $1.7 million to expand the program. Aside from buying more equipment, the money would pay for hiring 12 more special agents to relieve the work load, he said.

"I pay out what I consider an enormous amount of overtime," Madden said. "We are running these folks constantly all over the state."

The budget request was denied, but Madden said he will push for it again in next year's budget.

The advances in technology have given investigators a power they didn't have before, Madden said. That's why it's important for people to know that it's only used in criminal investigations, he said, and agents must show probable cause to trail a criminal suspect.

"One thing I hope that people understand is that we're not going out on a fishing expedition," he said. "It's not Big Brother watching everybody. I firmly believe that with this technology, we're saving lives. It may sound melodramatic, but it's the truth."

Justice Department challenges ruling on GPS use - Washington Times

The debate over warrantless GPS monitoring continues. (See previous posts here). The latest news? The Department of Justice has filed a Petition of Certiorari asking the United States Supreme Court to review the ruling of the Court of Appeals in Maynard v. United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. in the Tenth Circuit held police can’t use global positioning satellite (GPS) technology to track a suspect’s car without getting a warrant. The full court, in a 5-4 decision last fall, refused to reconsider the decision. Now, the Justice Department is requesting that the Supreme Court accept Certiorari. The Court of Appeals expressed a distinction between a person "exposing" themselves in public on roadways, and police tracking that reveals all the places a person may travel over the course of a month:

In the August 6, 2010 decision, Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote, "It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even follow someone during a single journey, . . . it is another thing for a stranger to [dog] his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores
that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.”

The Justice Department now requests that this be considered by the Supreme Court:

“Prompt resolution of this conflict is critically important to law enforcement efforts throughout the United States,” government attorneys argued in their petition. “The court of appeals’ decision seriously impedes the governments’ use of GPS devices at the beginning stages of an investigation when officers are gathering evidence …”

Attorneys for Jones, who remains in prison, argued that federal authorities violated Jones‘ reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment when they used a GPS device to track his movements.

“This is an issue over which a philosophically diverse appellate panel and a majority of the full court agreed,” Stephen C. Leckar, Jones‘ appeals attorney, said after the Justice Department filing.

“The public has a constitutional right that a neutral magistrate will decide in advance whether the police can secretly install in your car an extraordinarily intrusive device that will record relentlessly every seven to 10 seconds where you’ve traveled for over a month,” Mr. Leckar said. “To allow anything less would encourage further erosion of the Fourth Amendment, whose purpose was to curb such abuses of power.”

The issue is heating up elsewhere in the Supreme Court where a Petition was filed by the defendant challenging a Ninth Circuit ruling in United States v. Pineda-Moreno where the Ninth Circuit held that such a GPS tracking did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that such a track was not a search. The Ninth Circuit was asked to consider the case en banc and Judge Kozinski wrote an eloquent dissent, available here Circuit Court order denying en banc review, together with a vigorous dissent, is here.. The Supreme Court case, is filed under Pineda-Moreno v. United States, docket 10-7515. [petition available here].
Additional reporting available at Washington Post here or Inside GNSS here.
Stay tuned and keep preserving the issue of the GPS tracking in motions and investigation work.

GPS Tracker on Car Without a Warrant?

An interesting circuit split is developing on the issue of whether the police should be able to put a GPS tracking device on your car without first obtaining a warrant. In State of Wisconsin v. Sveum, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals upheld the use of a GPS device to gain information on the travel of Sveum:

The result is a detailed history, including time information, of the device’s location and, hence, the vehicle’s location. While Sveum’s car was in his driveway, police secretly attached the device to the underside of his car with a magnet and tape. The police tracked Sveum’s car with the device for about five weeks. During this time, Sveum parked his car in his enclosed garage and inside a garage at his place of employment, a car care center.

We agree with the State that neither a search nor a seizure occurs when the police use a GPS device to track a vehicle while it is visible to the general public. The seminal cases on this topic are United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), and United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984).

By contrast, in People v. Weaver, the New York Court of Appeals held that using a GPS device to track movements without a warrant does violate the New York State Constitution:

It would appear clear to us that the great popularity of GPS technology for its many useful applications, may not be taken simply as a massive, undifferentiated concession of personal privacy to agents of the state. Indeed, contemporary technology projects our private activities into public space as never before. Cell technology has moved presumptively private phone conversation from the enclosure of Katz's phone booth to the open sidewalk and the car, and the advent of portable computing devices has re-situated transactions of all kinds to relatively public spaces. It is fair to say, and we think consistent with prevalent social views, that this change in venue has not been accompanied by any dramatic diminution in the socially reasonable expectation that our communications and transactions will remain to a large extent private.

Fourth Amendment is Back: Justices Hold 9/0 that GPS Tracking Violates Fourth Amendment

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion this morning in United States v. Jones upholding the suppression of evidence obtained by police using GPS tracking technology. The Supreme Court, in a 9/0 decision, held that the placing and monitoring of an individual's movements through GPS tracking is a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The case stems from the conviction of Antoine Jones, a Washington D.C. nightclub owner who was suspected of drug dealing. Police had obtained a warrant to place a GPS device on Jones's car but they did not remove it when the warrant expired. They reinstalled the device and subsequently tracked Jones's movements for 28 days whereever his car went. Police used the GPS device to track Jones to a stash house, where they found cocaine, weapons and drug paraphernalia. He was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and sentenced to life in prison. The Supreme Court held that such an electronic search was a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The Court did not consider whether the search was "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment because the Government did not raise that below. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the Court, stated:

We hold that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a 'search'"

"The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information," Scalia said. "By attaching the device to the Jeep, officers encroached on a protected area."

GPS Tracking Podcast and Other Resources

We have blogged about law enforcement use of GPS tracking (search collected here) and, in doing some research on the topic recently, discovered some interesting resources of note when working on GPS tracking cases. The Department of Homeland Security has a podcast collection which includes this interesting transcript on GPS tracking and its use in federal law enforcement. Rockwell International, the pioneer of GPS, has some interesting resources that include information on the products that they sell to law enforcement for tracking. Finally, Wikipedia has some remarkably cool articles for the novice in need of background into GPS technology and its various uses.

GPS Evidence Might Drive Your Case Home

From Law.com

"A reporter recently interviewed me about in-car GPS navigation systems as evidence. Aside from vehicle tracking devices planted on suspect vehicles, neither of us could point to more than a few matters where GPS evidence played a role in court; yet, its untapped value to criminal and civil cases is enormous. Think how many murders, rapes, burglaries, robberies, thefts, kidnappings and drug deals could be solved -- and innocent persons exonerated -- by reliably placing suspects in space and time. DNA just puts the accused at the scene. Reliable GPS data puts the suspect there between 9:42 and 10:17 p.m. and reveals where she came from and went next."

Full article can be found here.

Warrants for Police GPS Surveillance?

From NACDL

Washington, DC­ (Feb. 6, 2009) -- A diverse group of civil liberties and religious organizations this week weighed in on the question of whether police need a warrant in order to conduct surveillance of personal vehicles by secretly attaching global positioning satellite (GPS) transmitters. The case, which is scheduled to be heard next month in New York’s highest court, has profound implications for the privacy rights of individuals and organizations.

Low-cost GPS transmitters can be secretly attached to a vehicle and pinpoint the vehicle’s location on public or private property, within a few feet or yards, to virtually any computer with an internet connection. The devices are useful for tracking a vehicle or person in real-time, but the data also can be permanently stored and subjected to pattern analysis, revealing not just a person’s whereabouts, but his habits, associations, who his friends are, where he shops, banks and goes to church, and a host of other information. The coalition argues that court supervision should be required to protect First and Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

In People v. Weaver, scheduled for argument in the New York Court of Appeals March 24, the court will be considering whether a police officer, in his own discretion, may undertake GPS surveillance of individuals without any judicial oversight at all. The court below held that there is no obligation to obtain a warrant prior to undertaking such monitoring. Members of the public have no way of knowing if their movements are subject to electronic surveillance from which there is no legal protection.

D.C. Circuit holds that GPS Monitoring is a Fourth Amendment Search

As reported at the Volokh Conspiracy, this week the D.C. Circuit held that government use of a GPS device to monitor the location of a car on public roads is a Fourth Amendment “search” when conducted over a long-term period, in this case a one month period of time. The case is United States v. Maynard. In Maynard, co-defendant Jones was convicted in a cocaine conspiracy which relied upon investigation resulting from the twenty-four hour a day monitoring of Jones's jeep over the period of one month. The D.C. Circuit held that the use of the GPS tracking device violated co-defendant Jones reasonable expectation of privacy:

Jones argues the use of the GPS device violated his ‘reasonable expectation of privacy,’ Katz, . . . and was therefore a search subject to the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment. Of course, the Government agrees the Katz test applies here, but it argues we need not consider whether Jones’s expectation of privacy wasreasonable because that question was answered in United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), in which the Supreme Court held the use of a beeper device to aid in tracking a suspect to his drug lab was not a search. As explained below, we hold Knotts does not govern this case and the police action was a search because it defeated Jones’s reasonable expectation of privacy.” Id. at 16 (Katz full cite omitted).

This decision is in conflict with the Ninth Circuit's opinion in United States v. Pinedo-Moreno, 591 F.3d 1212 (9th Cir, 2010). For more detailed discussion on how to use as a practitioner, see the Ninth Circuit Blog. The Ninth Circuit Blog article also contains an interesting discussion on the use of cell phone towers for pinging that is easier than ever before to use as a "tracking device". It is becoming routine that federal law enforcement are using cell-phone location data through sealed applications. (Further reading here).
When working this type of case as an Investigator, it is important to get discovery that includes the type of device used, how the device stores the information, whether there was a warrant application that included a time limit, and how the device works (e.g. whether the device can be remotely accessed or whether it has to be retrieved and manually downloaded) so that the investigator is armed with all information possible to assist in a motion to suppress.

New Blog "Intersection Between Criminal Law and Emerging Technology

Sentencing Law and Policy drew attention to "Stockycat", a strange name for a cool blog on the intersection between criminal law and emerging technology. Recent posts include Fourth Amendment implications of cell phone searches and GPS trackers on cars. The GPS post discusses the recent DC Circuit case of United States v. Maynard in which the DC Circuit held that GPS trackers could violate a person's reasonable expectation of privacy. Contrast with the Ninth Circuit's holding on the topic of GPS trackers in United States v. Pinedo-Moreno. (blogged about here). Given the focus on emerging technology, whether it be in the Fourth Amendment context or in data collection and analysis, a good resource is helpful to keep track of technology and its implications in criminal investigations.

Geotags in Web Photos Reveal Secrets about You

Finding information on Geotags off pictures that an investigator retrieves from sites like Facebook and MySpace can be useful when the exact location of where the picture was taken needs to be known.

 

KATE MURPHY, New York Times

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program "MythBusters," posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was "Now it's off to work," potential thieves knew he would not be at home.

Security experts and privacy advocates have recently begun warning about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smart phones and digital cameras. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online.

Savage said he knew about geotags. (He should, as host of a show popular with technology followers.) But he said he had neglected to disable the function on his iPhone before taking the picture and uploading it to Twitter.

"I guess it was a lack of concern because I'm not nearly famous enough to be stalked," he said, "and if I am, I want a raise."

Still, Savage has since turned off the geotag feature on his iPhone, and he isn't worried about the archived photo on Twitter because he has moved to a new residence.

But others may not be so technologically informed or so blase about their privacy.

"I'd say very few people know about geotag capabilities," said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, "and consent is sort of a slippery slope when the only way you can turn off the function on your smart phone is through an invisible menu that no one really knows about."

Indeed, disabling the geotag function generally involves going through several layers of menus until you find the "location" setting, then selecting "off" or "don't allow." But doing this can sometimes turn off all GPS capabilities, including mapping, so it can get complicated.

The website ICanStalkU.com provides step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices.

A person's location is also revealed while using services like Foursquare and Gowalla as well as when posting to Twitter from a GPS-enabled mobile device, but the geographical data is not hidden as it is when posting photos.

A handful of academic researchers and independent Web security analysts, who call themselves "white hat hackers," have been trying to raise awareness about geotags by releasing studies and giving presentations at technology get-togethers like the Hackers On Planet Earth, or Next HOPE, conference held last month in New York.

Their lectures and papers demonstrate the ubiquity of geotagged photos and videos on websites like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Craigslist, and how these photos can be used to identify a person's home and haunts.

Many of the pictures show people's children playing in or around their homes. Others reveal expensive cars, computers and flat-screen televisions. There are also pictures of people at their friends' houses or at the Starbucks they visit each morning.

By downloading free browser plug-ins like the Exif Viewer for Firefox (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3905/) or Opanda IExif for Internet Explorer (opanda.com/en/iexif/), anyone can pinpoint the location where the photo was taken and create a Google map.

Moreover, since multimedia sites like Twitter and YouTube have user-friendly application programming interfaces, or APIs, someone with a little knowledge about writing computer code can create a program to search for geotagged photos in a systematic way. For example, they can search for those accompanied with text like "on vacation" or those taken in a specified neighborhood.

"Any 16-year-old with basic programming skills can do this," said Gerald Friedland, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He and a colleague, Robin Sommer, wrote a paper, "Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging," which they presented on Tuesday at a workshop in Washington during the Advanced Computing Systems Association's annual conference on security.

The paper provides three examples of so-called cybercasing that use photos posted on Twitter and Craigslist and a homemade video on YouTube.

By looking at geotags and the text of posts, Sommer said, "you can easily find out where people live, what kind of things they have in their house and also when they are going to be away."

"Our intent is not to show how it's done," he said, "but raise awareness so people can understand their devices and turn off those options if they want to."

ICanStalkU.com, developed by the security consultants Larry Pesce of the NWN Corporation in Waltham, Mass., and Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs in Boston, uses a more direct approach to warning about the potential dangers of geotags. The site displays a real-time stream of geotagged photos posted on Twitter; the person who posted the photo also gets a notification via Twitter.

"The reaction from people is either anger, like 'I'm going to punch you out,' or 'No duh, like I didn't already know that' or 'Oh my God, I had no idea,'" Pesce said.

In the latter category was Cristina Parker of El Paso, Texas, who sells appliances part-time at Kmart and also manages social media for small companies. ICanStalkU.com notified her last week that a photo she had posted on Twitter of her Chihuahua, Zipp, also revealed where she lived.

"I immediately tweeted back to find out what I can do about it," said Parker. The site sent her a Web link to instructions on how to turn off the geotag function on her LG Ally smart phone. "It's definitely good to know for me personally and because of my social media work, too," she said

Because of the way photographs are formatted by some sites like Facebook and Match.com, geotag information is not always retained when an image is uploaded, which provides some protection, albeit incidental. Other sites like Flickr have recently taken steps to block access to geotag data on images taken with smart phones unless a user explicitly allows it.

But experts say the problem goes far beyond social networking and photo sharing websites, regardless of whether they offer user privacy settings.

"There are so many places where people upload photos, like personal blogs and bulletin boards," said Johannes B. Ullrich, chief technology officer of the SANS Technology Institute, which provides network security training and monitors the Internet for emerging security threats.

Protecting your privacy is not just a matter of being aware and personally responsible, said Sommer, the researcher. A friend may take a geotagged photo at your house and post it.

"You need to educate yourself and your friends but in the end, you really have no control," he said, adding that he was considering writing a program to troll the Internet for photos with geotags corresponding to users' home addresses.

"I'm beginning to think there may be a market for it."

FBI Stopped Using Over 3,000 GPS Trackers After Supreme Court Ruling

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in United States v. Jones overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.

Last Friday during a conference held at the University of San Francisco entitled "Big Brother in the 21st Century" USDOJ Mr. Weissmann said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use. Hmmm.

These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law. Of course, the FBI may still have some of the data and intelligence already accumulated prior to shutting off the device....

GPS Monitoring & the Fourth Amendment in PI Magazine

Check out the latest issue of PI Magazine for our featured article on GPS Monitoring and the Fourth Amendment. The latest on the topic is that we still wait for a Supreme Court opinion which is slated for the 2011 term. The United States just filed its brief in the case of United States v. Jones. The issue the 2011 Supreme Court will decide is: (1) Whether the warrantless use of a tracking device on petitioner's vehicle to monitor its movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment; and (2) whether the government violated respondent's Fourth Amendment rights by installing the GPS tracking device on his vehicle without a valid warrant and without his consent. Stay Tuned

Supreme Court Grants Review on GPS Monitoring Cases

The Supreme Court granted Certiorari in United States v. Jones (Docket: 10-1259) this morning. The issues presented are as follows:

1)Whether the warrantless use of a tracking device on petitioner’s vehicle to monitor its movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment.
2) Whether the government violated the respondent’s Fourth Amendment rights by installing the tracking device without a valid warrant and without his consent.

The issue is perhaps the most important privacy/Fourth Amendment case since the Katz decision involving telephones. GPS trackers have become a prevalent law enforcement tool that not only allows the police to track movements of a person, but construct meaning from those movements. Stay tuned.

NACDL Updated Fourth Amendment Resource

NACDL (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) has announced an update to their Fourth Amendment Page (here). The Fourth Amendment page now has topics broken up into Fourth Amendment Reports, Fourth Amendment Amicus Briefs, Fourth Amendment Advocacy Letters and Other Fourth Amendment Resources. In addition, the page has special coverage on topics such as GPS tracking, cellphone tracking, and government use of drones. It is a good place to start when dealing with search and seizure issues.

Gadget Gives Cops Quick Access to Cell Phone Data

By Bob Sullivan

The "Universal Forensic Extraction Device" sounds like the perfect cell phone snooping gadget.

Its maker, Israel-based Cellbrite, says it can copy all the content in a cell phone -- including contacts, text messages, call history, and pictures -- within a few minutes. Even deleted texts and other data can be restored by UFED 2.0, the latest version of the product, it says.

And it really is a universal tool. The firm says UFED works with 3,000 cell phone models, representing 95 percent of the handset market. Coming soon, the firm says UFED works with 3,000 cell phone models, representing 95 percent of the handset market. Coming soon, the firm says on its website: "Additional major breakthroughs, including comprehensive iPhone physical solution; Android physical support – allowing bypassing of user lock code, (Windows Phone) support, and much more." For good measure, UFEC can extract information from GPS units in most cars.

The gadget isn't a stalker's dream; it's an evidence-gathering tool for law enforcement. Cellbrite claims it’s already in use in 60 countries.

That apparently includes the U.S. The American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan says it has learned that state police there have purchased some of the gadgets. What is it doing with them? So far, Michigan authorities aren't telling. A public records request for information by the ACLU was met with a prohibitive $500,000 bill to cover the supposed cost of making the documents available.

"They did produce documents which confirmed that they have them," said Mark Fancher, a staff attorney at the ACLU office. "We have no idea what they are doing with them."

Technology and the Fourth Amendment have had a rocky relationship. When The Founding Fathers created protections against unlimited search and seizure, they never imagined the kind of tools that would be available to 21st century police officers.

Cell phone data is an indispensible tool in both investigations and prosecutions. A drug dealer's contact list is an obvious treasure trove. Location information stored in the phone can prove (or disprove) an alibi. Texts are at least as valuable as emails. Increasingly, smartphone s are used as mini-laptops, placing even more ready-made evidence in one small package -- as long as law enforcement can get to it before it's destroyed.

Because handsets are nearly always with suspects, it's easy for a would-be criminal to delete information during a traffic stop. Remote wiping programs exist that mean critical evidence could be destroyed even after a police officer takes possession of a suspect's phone. That means law enforcement official s have great interest in slurping up all the secrets that a handset might contain as quickly as possible. Enter Cellbrite.

But how fast is too fast? Fancher and the ACLU argue that most cell phone searches are an invasion of privacy that requires law enforcement officials to get a court order before rummaging through a suspect's handset data. While UFED could be used after an order is obtained, its obvious focus is on time-critical searches -- those that would occur, for example, right after a "routine traffic stop."

Full article can be found here.

A Spy in Your Own Car

Here is an interesting new twist on car technology-the little black box that is in your car may be transmitting and saving data about you. Newer cars are coming equipped with electronic data recorders that capture information about speed, steering, and brake use before a crash. Additionally, newer cars are coming with GPS and hands-free phones that store our caller information. These features are designed with our safety in mind; however an unfortunate by-product is that it allows the collection and storage of private information sometimes without the owner's knowledge or consent.

On the one hand, this information could be valuable if you are an investigator working on a case involving a car accident, whether it be criminal or civil. On the other hand, it does create certain privacy concerns.

For more information, see here.

Surveillance Planes: Eyes in the Sky

Aerial drones will hunt California pot growers in national forests

Posted using ShareThis

Reported by NORML recently: the federal government plans to escalate its eradication of marijuana plantations in the backwoods of national forests this year, beginning in California with the deployment of larger strike teams and the controversial launching of miniature, remote-controlled spy planes to outfox growers. The Forest Service's Law Enforcement and Investigations unit recently purchased the SkySeer craft to assist in remote surveillance efforts. Designed by Octatron, the SkySeer Unmanned Aerial Vehicle can search out points of interest from GPS either programmed or entered from the ground station. It has up to a two-mile range and a night vision thermal imaging feature for nighttime snooping. The SkySeer has a video surveillance camera that captures in real time and can be controlled by the ground; the video can be recorded to DVD or flash media from the ground. Be on the lookout for this technology in cases coming up especially in US Forest Service land.

Inside the Fishbowl

I have worried a good deal about that fish bowl over the years, and it seems pretty clear that it’s getting smaller, and its walls are getting more transparent. To give just one example, the other day one of my sons sent me a link to a satellite picture of my house from Google Maps. You could not only see the house in pretty clear detail, but you could see who was home, from the two cars in the yard—my son’s blue Subaru and my brother-in-law’s gray Avalanche. I was very happy that I hadn’t been taking one of my famous nude sun-baths on my patio.

This excerpt appeared in the Stanford Online Law Review in an article entitled, "The Dead Past" written by Judge Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 117). In the article, Chief Judge Kozinski discusses some of the recent technology related decisions related to GPS monitoring and privacy in the digital age. The article focuses on the intersection of law and technology: "And this brings into focus a key issue in the law pertaining to privacy: Not everything an individual wishes to keep private is legally protected as such. The law, and particularly the Fourth Amendment, only protects those items as to which an individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy." Chief Judge Kozinski famously dissented in the denial of an en banc review last year in United States v. Pineda-Moreno, pointing out the slow erosion of the Fourth Amendment and privacy:

Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, United States v. Lemus, 596 F.3d 512 (9th Cir. 2010) (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc); United States v. Black, 482 F.3d 1044 (9th Cir. 2007) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home’s curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.

Chief Judge Kozinski eloquently expounds on the law and privacy themes in "The Dead Past", concluding that the fishbowl continues to be constructed by our own hands. (full article here).