As if they read my blog…

The Wall Street Journal has a follow-up today that talks about how police track our locations with our cell phones. Now, answering one of my own questions, thanks to some discussion with my wife, what is the difference between using a GPS tracker and a cell phone?

First, of course you can always turn off your cell phone. Because you know you are being tracked, you have a means to defend your privacy. Is it a reasonable means? I would argue “no”. In addition, the feds do not own the data. Instead they have to go to the phone companies to get it. And they do that quite a bit more than using GPS trackers, according to the article. And why not? You pay for the cell phone and your carrier retains the data. It’s darn cheap for the police to make use of all of that rather than have to pay for the tracker and manage it.

There’s another big difference that I alluded to. Police in America do get a court order for cell phone location information. This is why I believe the Obama administration should fail. It is not an onerous task, judging by numbers, to get such an order, and since it isn’t, the onus falls on the administration to show why they shouldn’t make use of the exact same mechanism when the technology changes.

GPS and the 4th Amendment: Can police track you without your knowledge?

Does the government have the right to know where you are at all times? This is a question that will be answered by the Supreme Court over the next year. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Supreme Court will examine today a case in which the police and the FBI attached a GPS tracking device to the car of a night club owner who was suspected of dealing drugs. At issue is whether this constituted an unreasonable search or seizure by the government, a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

As the article points out, the Fourth Amendment protects us only from the government eye when there is some reasonable expectation of privacy. That which occurs on the street in plain view is not usually considered private. However, in this case, the question is whether the body of evidence gathered by the police would be considerably more than just some onlooker happening to see you at a particular point in time. Instead, it would be more like an concerted army of people following you 24 hours per day for as long as the GPS unit were in place.

From a technology perspective, while it may be possible to detect such tracking devices, it might prove very difficult. For one thing, there’s no reason the device would need to signal to the police every moment of the day where it is. Rather it could store the information and transmit it only periodically.

What’s more, we all carry tracking devices with us nearly 24 hours per day. They’re called cell phones. While some use GPS, the cell phone network knows where you are (or at least where your phone is), with or without GPS.

Here are my questions:

Does the government need a warrant to receive cellular network location data? If so, what is the difference between cellular network location data and GPS tracking data?
If the government has the right to install a tracking device, assuming you could find the device, do you have the right to remove it? After all, it is your vehicle.
If the government has the right to track you via GPS, can others do the same? What is to stop insurance companies, employers, or criminals from tracking you?

It’s the first question I find most profound, because if the government is allowed to attach these devices to you without a warrant, without any cause, they can follow anyone from anywhere to anywhere at any time, from birth to death. In fact, they could create an enormous database to simply keep track of the location of everyone.

This is not to say that the government shouldn’t track people it reasonably believes to be criminals. That is why the judiciary exists- to provide oversight over the process so that peoples’ rights can be balanced.

One final scary thought: such a database might already exist, and might be in the hands of criminals. As I wrote above, cellular companies already know where you are. If they’ve been hacked and don’t know it, who knows where that data resides?

The Move: After

And now for the new house.

That’s the front door with a stack of wood on the left. Yes, we have a fireplace. I’m not that much into wood fires, because they tend to add too many particulates into the air, but Christine likes a good fire. I figure we’ll have one or two per season, but we’ll see.

Here’s Christine i the dining room (it’s one large great room). It’s nice and sunny. We’re a bit close in to our neighbors, but as it happens, they all have kids the same age as ours, so we’ll view this as a good thing.

We have a small yard with two gardens. We’ll probably reduce that down to one. Yes, I’ve had to mow the lawn already.

Yes, we were motivated to unpack the wine. We were a bit crazy and actually had a holiday booked before we found this house. So the order of execution was:

Pack nearly everything
Go on holiday for two weeks
Return on a Sunday morning
Finish packing
Close on the house on Monday
Move on Tuesday & Wednesday
Drink on Thursday

Amidst everything we have a sauna in the new place. As it turns out, neither Christine or I like saunas, and so we have to decide what to do with this. Suggestions welcome.

Oddly it’s in the utility room, but you really don’t notice that factoid from inside. It does explain why the utility room has a shower.

One other little feature of this house that we DO like is that it has geothermal heating. A pump takes water down and up a large pipe that was drilled deep into the ground. No oil, and electricity and the fireplace as a backup. That’s pretty cool.

And so there you have it. For now…

The Move: Before

Many people have asked about how our move went. We now have some before and after pictures, with just a bit of commentary.

This is our old “Wintergarten”, with sattelite dish disassembled. While this was a nice sunny room, the windows were quite high and it was quite hot in the summer.

Boxes, boxes, and more boxes. We had about 120 boxes by the time we were said and done. Boxes were something that came free in the last move, but here in Switzerland nothing comes for free. We ended up spending almost CHF 700 on just boxes. In general, the cost and effort for the move for 1km is not all that different than a 10,000km move.

And a final view of everything before the movers arrive. After the move, this place had to be cleaned. Goodbye Weberweg.

How bad do your lawyers have to be for you to get a new trial… in a death penalty case?

The New York Times reports a ridiculous case that was heard by the Supreme Court, which seems to come right out of the movie Brazil, in which a combination of events leads to a defendant in a capital murder case losing his rights to appeal in the state of Alabama. According to the article, a court had sent its ruling to two associates at a firm in New York who had work on behalf of defendant Cory Maples. The problems started when the associates left. The firm then returned the judgment to the court marked “returned to sender”. The court clerk received the envelope and did nothing. The local counsel of record also failed to follow up with the appeal. Eventually, the window that defendants have to file appeals elapsed, at which point the prosecutor seemingly gloated directly to Mr. Maples.

The only good news in this case is that the Supreme Court is now hearing it, and at least in oral arguments they seem to have been as incensed at the callous treatment of a defendant as one would hope they should be.

So now my questions, and I have many:

Why is it that this case had to get to the Supreme Court in the first place? Is administrative incompetence grounds for rushing to kill someone?
Does the current state of law and societal view towards prosecutorial discretion need correction? Here, in a case where the prosecutor clearly could have weighed in to prevent a travesty, he instead seemingly chose to gloat. Doesn’t that argue for stronger judicial oversight?
Should there be sanctions against the local lawyer who failed to at all follow up in a death penalty case?
In this case, how broadly should the Court rule? They could simply state that the confluence of events led to a perverse situation that requires redress, and narrowly rule, or they could require that states shoulder at least some burden to see that defendants are receiving fair treatment. What would that look like?
If this is what happens in death penalty cases, what sort of miscarriages of justice are taking place in other cases, and how do we know?

What do you think?