GPS creator against spying on a suspect’s location without a court order

^{In the photo: President George W. Bush awards the creator of GPS, Roger Easton, the "National Medal of Technology" - the highest state award for achievements in the development of technology. 2006, Associated Press}

We all remember the recent hype around iOS and Android devices with built-in GPS-module, which collected data about the location of devices (and, oddly enough, their owners) into one large database. When it was discovered, many - including the courts and government officials in the United States asked many "uncomfortable" questions from Apple and Google. But, it would seem, the conflict had exhausted itself - hot fixes were issued, prohibiting the device to take readings about the location without authorization, thus satisfying the requests of device users. In the midst of this spy story, I wanted to write about it on Habré, but my inner voice kept saying “Wait.” I literally felt that the story would not end so easily, in which not even the state, but private companies, allow themselves to collect extremely sensitive information - in fact, to follow an individual person day and night.

And so, quite recently, while reading Wired, I came across an interesting discussion of this problem, not within society as such, but as separate and extremely interesting personalities and organizations: from the creator of the Global Positioning System, Roger L. Easton (in the photo), to the Supreme Court USA. The essence of the problem is simple and obvious, but nonetheless, each of us is interested in whether the authorities can allow themselves to activate the GPS module in any of your devices (and today we are surrounded by a huge number of such devices, each of which can turn into a watchdog) without giving out warrant to install surveillance? In fact, this is a de facto problem, that is - this is already happening, at the moment, not only in the USA. Consider: the GPS module is soulless, it only shows your position in three coordinates in space and, in time alone, what is the probability that once representatives of any power structure will not come to your house simply because you, conditionally, were not in That place, at the wrong time, and the GPS data suggests that you were in the same room with the conditional "Bin Laden"?

This story begins simply: the creator of GPS sent a petition to the US Supreme Court to refuse the proposal of the Obama administration, according to which any GPS device could be used to track a person without issuing a court order.
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This promises to turn into the largest national debate on the fourth amendment to the US Constitution over the past ten years, because not only Easton participates in them, but also the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other academic circles, which, unlike the authorities, against turning the free community into a “surveillance society” and a reality according to Orwell. The first court hearing is scheduled for November 8.

Despite the fact that George Easton is 90 years old now and he has been creating, then, the Timation Satellite Navigation System (original, military, GPS name) in the naval research laboratory more than fifty years ago, what is happening indicates his sound mind even in such age

However, it may not be so easy to resist the apparatus, especially against the background of the craze for “combating terrorism”, for the purposes of which any means can be used, and in fact are widely used. But the problem of violation of the fourth amendment began in 1983, when the same US Supreme Court declared that “there is no conflict” in the use of the so-called. beeper or beacons to monitor the vehicle of the suspect without issuing a court order. But the difference between the use of the beeper and the automatic GPS module is quite fundamental: in the first case, direct optical contact with the target is required, that is, tracking is two-way: it is both electronic and visual. On the other side of the medal is tracking using the built-in GPS-module, which can completely eliminate the participation of a person in the monitoring process, because he always works, except for some unlikely situations.

Actually, the automatic tracking with the help of GPS is the main ideological problem that they will try to solve in the Supreme Court. If a court order is not required to carry out surveillance of a suspect, each of us can be proclaimed a suspect, and then ... the situation is limited only by the imagination of various "security services".

Observation using a traditional beeper requires that a police officer (or other unit) follow the target vehicle throughout the surveillance in order to confirm the location of the vehicle and the tracking device. This has to be done because the beeper and receiver of its signal can only give "directions", not self-determining in space. That is, the signal that the beeper sends to its receiver is exactly the direction, for example, “northwest” or “southeast”. But the exact location can only be established by visual observation.

Moreover, the imperfection of the beeper is also in the fact that its signal is limited - it can be removed at a distance of three to five kilometers on an open road and up to twenty-five kilometers. in the air. In the dense buildings of the city, its sensitivity drops to two blocks. In contrast, GPS, which determines its position using four satellites in orbit, as we know, works globally and to within a few meters, or even centimeters. Without the establishment of visual contact and due to the practical absence of the presumption of innocence in some developed countries (including the United States, against the backdrop of the fight against terrorism), the GPS module of a phone or any other device can become the main prosecutor in the “state against you” case.

Maybe I am dramatizing, but since the US has a precedent judicial system, then there should be a trial on the topic somewhere. It is - now before the judges in the Supreme Court of the United States lies the case of a cocaine dealer, who was fully automatic GPS-monitored for a month, without a court order issued, and actual evidence of his guilt was found when police asked for a search warrant for places in which the suspect happened most often. From the point of view of "justice" - this is an advanced system that allows you to hit the sore point of the underworld. From the point of view of objective reality, this is a direct violation of the right to private property and the inviolability of private life, which is guaranteed by the fourth amendment to the constitution.

Representatives of the prosecution told the court that "GPS devices have already become familiar tools in the fight against crime." Roger Easton declined to comment on this statement.

PS And here is the proof of the hypothesis : "California Governor Jerry Brown put a veto on the obligation to have a court order to get all the information from the suspect's phone."
And then another article , which already deals with obtaining information from private companies on the basis of only one vague law, according to which the user is not even notified that all his activities are under observation.