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?

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?

U.S. Currency War with China?

This short piece is on News Hour introduces us to the politics of currency manipulation. A government who keeps its currency artificially low is in essence dumping their goods and services on every other country, thereby taking jobs from those countries. The hard part is determining when prices are really artificially low. While it is in the end a political opinion, we have some hints as to when the price of a currency is really lower than it should be. One of those is when per-capita income is higher than another country’s and yet there is still a net export of goods and services. According to the International Monetary Fund, for 2010, the U.S. had the 7th highest per capita income of $46,860, while China came in a distant 94th with $7,544 per person. China’s trade surplus for that same year was $190 billion. Were we to attribute all of that to the United States, that would add about $680 to the U.S. per capita income.

On the other hand, Perhaps, on the other hand, the U.S. currency is too high. After all, the U.S. trade deficit for 2010 was $498 billion. But then what do we do about it? To lower the value of the dollar you simply print more. Of course that risks inflation. And if you do print more, why shouldn’t another country respond by printing more of its own currency?

It’s a messy business, and given the amount of money to be made or lost in speculating on currency, the U.S. Senate should be very careful about the sort of laws they pass, particularly ones that in some way ties the Treasury Department’s arms in dealing with currency crises. Thar be dragons here.

How do electoral math differ from popular votes?

After the 2000 election one might think that everyone in the world understands how an American president is elected. For those who don’t remember or don’t understand, electors are allocated to each state based on how many congressmen and senators that state has. For example, South Dakota has one congressman and two senators, and is therefore entitled to 3 electoral votes. Therefore, with the total number of congressmen being 435 and there being 100 senators, along with three electors allocated by Constitutional amendment to Washington D.C., there are total of 538 electors.

So how far off from the popular vote could an electoral vote get? To figure this out, you need to know how many voters there are in each state and the number of electors per state. 270 electors can be gotten by winning evenly 50% of the votes in the 11 largest states in the Union. If the loser were to take 50%-1 vote in those states, plus all the votes in the other states, using 2008 voter information, the winner would need only 43 million votes, while the loser could have over 110 million, or 71% of all the votes. This is how President Bush won the election 2001 but lost the popular vote.

The electoral system almost always produces less dramatic results that do not mirror the popular vote. Let’s look at a few percentages:

>Year	Who	Winner Electoral Votes	Loser Electoral Votes	Percentage Electoral Win/Loss	Winner Popular Votes	Loser Popular Votes	Percentage Popular Win/Loss
1904	Roosevelt v. Parker	336	140	70.6%/39.4	7,630,457	5,083,880	56.4%/37.6%
1908	Taft v. Bryan	321	162	66%/34%	7,678,395	6,408,984	51.6%/43.0%
1912	Wilson v. Roosevelt	435	88	82%/17%	6,296,284	4,122,721	41.8%/27.4%
1916	Wilson v. Hughes	277	254	52%/48%	9,126,868	8,548,728	49.2%/46.1%
1920	Harding v. Cox	404	127	76%/24%	16,144,093	9,139,661	60.3%/34.1%
1924	Collidge v. Davis/Follette	382	149	72%/28%	15,723,789	13,217,948	54%/45.4
1928	Hoover v. Smith	444	87	84%/16%	21,427,123	15,015,464	58.2%/40.8%
1932	Roosevelt v. Hoover	472	59	89%/11%	22,281,277	15,761,254	57.4%/39.7%
1936	Roosevelt v. Landon	523	8	98%/2%	27,752,648	16,681,862	61%/37%
1940	Roosevelt v. Wilkie	449	82	85%/15%	27,313,945	22,347,744	54.7%/44.7%
1944	Roosevelt v. Dewey	432	99	81%/19%	25,612,916	22,017,929	53.4%/45.9%
1948	Truman v. Dewey/Thurmond	303	228	57%/43%	24,179,347	23,167,222	49.6%/47.5%
1952	Eisenhauer v. Stevenson	442	89	83%/17%	34,075,529	27,375,090	55%/44%
1956	Eisenhauer v. Stevenson	457	73	86%/14%	35,579,180	26,028,028	57%/24%
1960	Kennedy v. Nixon	303	219	56.5%/40.9%	34,220,911	34,108,157	49.7%/49.6%
1964	Johnson v. Goldwater	486	52	90%/10%	43,127,041	27,175,754	61%/39%
1968	Nixon v. Humphrey/Wallace	301	191 + 96	56%/36%/18%	31,783,783	41,172,957 (total)	43.4%/56.2%
1972	Nixon v. McGovern	520	17	97%/3%	47,168,710	29,173,222	61%/38%
1976	Carter v. Ford	297	240	55%/45%	40,831,881	39,148,634	50.1%/48.0%
1980	Reagan v. Carter	489	49	91%/9%	43,903,230	35,480,115	50.7%/41.0%
1984	Reagan v. Mondale	525	13	98%/2%	54,455,472	37,577,352	59%/41%
1988	Bush v. Dukakis	426	111	79%/21%	48,886,597	41,809,476	53.4%/45.7%
1992	Clinton v. Bush	370	168	69%/31%	44,909,806	39,104,550	43%/37.5%
1996	Clinton v. Dole	379	159	70%/30%	47,401,185	39,197,469	49.2%/40.7%
2000	Bush v. Gore	271	266	50.4%/49.6%	50,456,002	50,999,897	47.9%/48.4%
2004	Bush v. Kerry	286	251	53%/47%	62,040,610	59,028,444	50.7%/48.3%
2008	Obama v. McCain	365	173	68%/32%	69,456,897	59,934,814[	53%/46%

In this table, the closest the popular and electoral votes come together is in 1916, although Bush v. Kerry comes close.

So what do we learn from all of this? I see two key messages:

The nature of the electoral voting system wildly distorts popular will in favor of each state getting at least some voice. This was, after all, the reason for its design.
National polls are, at best, a finger in the wind, and may be entirely misleading.

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As if On Queue: Google accounts attacked from China

The BBC reports today how China is rejecting Google’s statement that attacks on its users originated from China. It’s very fair for China to call into question from whence attacks originate. The best Google can really authoritatively say is that they saw attacks coming from a particular set of IP addresses that happen to be registered to a network that resides in a particular location, in this case Jinan.

However, the attacks targeted individuals said to be Chinese dissidents or adversaries. In this case, as the BBC writes, while it is very difficult to state with assurance that the attacks were made by the Chinese government, the technique used, spear phishing, leads one to believe that this attack was in fact paid for, in some way, by a government. Spear phishing involves learning about a particular individual, and then crafting a message that that person would think came from someone they knew, and convincing that person to view an attachment that itself contains a virus. That virus must be relatively unknown, or virus checkers will pick it up. The cost of spear phishing is high, and the monetary pay-off tends to be low. Therefore, it is a good fit for an intelligence organization.

In addition, as I wrote not long ago, Cambridge University investigated a break-in of the Office of His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. Those attacks also seemed to originate from China, they were also targeted against an adversary, and worst of all, China apparently acted upon the information stolen by applying diplomatic pressure against those countries who invited the Dalai Lama.

At the very least, China bears some culpability for allowing the attack. Here we have a government that does not believe in the free flow of information, and so they are known for monitoring everything. How, then, did this attack escape their notice?