Immanuel
Gold Member
- May 15, 2007
- 16,828
- 2,269
- 183
Oil change reignites debate over GPS trackers - Yahoo! News
The USA Patriot Act was one of the things that turned me against the Republican Party. It is things like the above story that have made me feel like we no longer live in a land governed by a government, "of the people, by the people and for the people".
How do you all feel about this particular case? Does the fact that the student (I should identify him as "the victim") has an Arabic sounding name and is apparently Arabic make a difference to you?
Immie
SAN FRANCISCO Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage.
The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it.
Two days later, FBI agents arrived at Afifi's Santa Clara apartment and demanded the return of their property a global positioning system tracking device now at the center of a raging legal debate over privacy rights.
One federal judge wrote that the widespread use of the device was straight out of George Orwell's novel, "1984".
"By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives," wrote Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a blistering dissent in which a three-judge panel from his court ruled that search warrants weren't necessary for GPS tracking.
The USA Patriot Act was one of the things that turned me against the Republican Party. It is things like the above story that have made me feel like we no longer live in a land governed by a government, "of the people, by the people and for the people".
How do you all feel about this particular case? Does the fact that the student (I should identify him as "the victim") has an Arabic sounding name and is apparently Arabic make a difference to you?
Immie