Officer Bob

WASHINGTON, DC: After reading this Washington Post story on GPS tracking by cops, I see some people got nothing better to do with their time than whine about how us cops have “too much power”. Alla you ACLU types had better get this straight: we do what we want to whoever we want whenever we want. And when there’s new technology like GPS out there, we don’t even need a warrant to use it.

You gotta problem widdat?

Across the country, police are using GPS devices to snare thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators and killers, often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell’s Big Brother society. Law enforcement officials, when they discuss the issue at all, said GPS is essentially the same as having an officer trail someone, just cheaper and more accurate. Most of the time, as was done in the Foltz case, judges have sided with police.

With the courts’ blessing, and the ever-declining cost of the technology, many analysts believe that police will increasingly rely on GPS as an effective tool in investigations and that the public will hear little about it. Last year, FBI agents used a GPS device while investigating an embezzlement scheme to steal from District taxpayers, attaching one to a suspect’s Jaguar.
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“I’ve seen them in cases from New York City to small towns — whoever can afford to get the equipment and plant it on a car,” said John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “And of course, it’s easy to do. You can sneak up on a car and plant it at any time.”