Category: Tracking System

• January 18th, 2012
• Jackson Parker

Police in Sherburne County, MN, began to suspect Sin Santo Bad was behind a string of residential burglaries when a witness reported seeing a vehicle with the license plate “BAD SIN” parked outside a house while it was being burglarized. The license plate “BAD SIN” was registered to Bad’s personal vehicle.

Sheriff deputies later received permission from one of the owners of the potato processing company where Bad worked to put a GPS tracking device on a company-owned pick-up truck. The GPS tracking device allowed officers to monitor the truck’s location and movements, but it did not transmit conversations from inside the truck or show the truck’s contents. [More…]

In September 2009, a company employee called the sheriff’s office to report that Bad was going to be using the company-owned truck for work that day. Deputies used the GPS tracking device to follow the truck, and what they found him doing was outrageous.

• January 5th, 2012
• Aurielle Destiche

NY Appeals Court Approves GPS Tracking of Employees

Based on the court’s ruling in November, the New York State Department of Labor was within its rights when it placed a GPS tracking device on an employee’s private car without his knowledge and monitored him for several weeks (even after work hours and while he was on vacation) to determine whether he was submitting fraudulent time cards. [More…]

The case – Michael A. Cunningham v New York State Department of Labor – is just the latest to raise the question of GPS tracking by the government. In a 3-2 decision on Wednesday, the court dismissed claims by Michael Cunningham, a former Labor Department employee who was fired for misconduct, that the use of the global positioning system device had constituted illegal search and seizure.

The NY Labor Dept. fired Cunningham in 2010, who was first hired in 1980, but had a history of misconduct, relying on data from a GPS tracking device placed in his personal car to show he had submitted false expense sheets and other travel records. Cunningham sued and demanded a new hearing, saying the data should have been suppressed at his termination hearing.

• January 4th, 2012
• Jackson Parker

GPS Tracking Takes Privacy Invasion to a Whole New Level

In November 2011, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in US v Jones, a case The New York Times recently dubbed “the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade.”

The Jones case will set the precedent for the legality and limitations of GPS tracking without a warrant. The Supreme Courts will address a question that has divided the lower courts for years: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?

The NY Times said, “the answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.