IM IN UR CAR, PLANTING MY GPSs
Oct. 14th, 2010 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogITEM: Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old student at Mission College, discovers a GPS tracking device attached to his car and – upon removing it – receives a visit from the FBI, who say they’d like it back, please.
Then they start asking him questions about a blog post allegedly made by a friend of his (which he’d never read) that speculates on how easy it would be to bomb a shopping mall (the point of the post being that if terrorism was as big a threat as the govt says, we’d have seen a lot more domestic terrorist attacks by now).
The agents left and Afifi wasn’t arrested or charged. But what this boils down to is this:
The FBI put a tracking device on the car of a US citizen simply for being the friend of someone who posted something that mentioned bombs. That was their sole criteria.
Bruce Schneier asks some good questions worth asking, considering the Ninth Circuit Court recently ruled that the police do not need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to yr car. I doubt the FBI is sticking these devices on every car in America (if only because they don’t have the budget to buy that many devices). But with really lax criteria like that and no need to prove to a judge this person needs tracking, we’re likely to see more cases like this pop up.
And as usual, most people won’t care as long as it happens to, you know, suspicious people.
Follow that car,
This is dF
Then they start asking him questions about a blog post allegedly made by a friend of his (which he’d never read) that speculates on how easy it would be to bomb a shopping mall (the point of the post being that if terrorism was as big a threat as the govt says, we’d have seen a lot more domestic terrorist attacks by now).
The agents left and Afifi wasn’t arrested or charged. But what this boils down to is this:
The FBI put a tracking device on the car of a US citizen simply for being the friend of someone who posted something that mentioned bombs. That was their sole criteria.
Bruce Schneier asks some good questions worth asking, considering the Ninth Circuit Court recently ruled that the police do not need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to yr car. I doubt the FBI is sticking these devices on every car in America (if only because they don’t have the budget to buy that many devices). But with really lax criteria like that and no need to prove to a judge this person needs tracking, we’re likely to see more cases like this pop up.
And as usual, most people won’t care as long as it happens to, you know, suspicious people.
Follow that car,
This is dF
