Americans have become accustomed to the presence of Global Positioning System (or GPS) technology embedded in everything from the GPS on their dash to their cell phones and iPads. In fact, GPS is nearly taken for granted for everything from locating a restaurant to navigating a fishing boat through the fog. But now it appears that GPS, which was developed primarily for its military applications, is rather overtly returning to its "national security" roots, as NASA plans to turn the security of the GPS system over to the Department of Homeland Security...[Full Article]
WASHINGTON (AP) - A community college student who says he's never done anything that should attract the interest of federal law enforcement officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car.
Yasir Afifi, 20, says a mechanic doing an oil change on his car in October discovered the device stuck with magnets between his right rear wheel and exhaust. They weren't sure what it was, but Afifi had the mechanic remove it and a friend posted photos of it online to see whether anyone could identify it. Two days later, Afifi says, agents wearing bullet-proof vests pulled him over as he drove away from his apartment in San Jose, Calif., and demanded their property back...[Full Article]
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — More than 1,100 registered sex offenders live and work in Allegheny County and 43 of them are now wearing monitoring devices as a condition of their parole.
District Attorney Stephen Zappala blames the nature of the crime for the need to better track these offenders.
“Because the psychology of the crime of the criminal actually is, they will re-offend and so we’re looking at persons who are recidivists,” Zappala said.
The offenders are monitored by places like Guardian Protection Service. The system uses GPS technology.
As long as the offenders stay in the inclusion area, they’re OK, but if they travel into an exclusion area, police are notified immediately...
A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.
It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted its expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.
The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.
Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.
An FBI spokesman wouldn’t acknowledge that the device belonged to the agency or that agents appeared at Afifi’s house.
“I can’t really tell you much about it, because it’s still an ongoing investigation,” said spokesman Pete Lee, who works in the agency’s San Francisco headquarters.
Afifi, the son of an Islamic-American community leader who died a year ago in Egypt, is one of only a few people known to have found a government-tracking device on their vehicle...
The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.
The Justice Department is demanding a federal appeals court rehear a case in which it reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month, without a court warrant. The authorities then obtained warrants to search and find drugs in the locations where defendant Antoine Jones had travelled.
The administration, in urging the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reverse a three-judge panel’s August ruling from the same court, said Monday that Americans should expect no privacy while in public...
In a bid to set parents' nerves at ease, a southwest suburban school district has become one of the first in the state to begin using GPS to track schoolchildren riding buses to and from school each day.
Palos Heights School District 128 had previously been using ZPass, a GPS technology provided by Seattle-based Zonar Systems, to track the buses. But now the district is outfitting students' backpacks with a luggage tag-sized unit that logs when the student steps on and off the bus...
[Webmaster - First in California...now in Illinois. They always make it for a "good reason". These children are being conditioned to be "good citizens" when they grow up. It will seem perfectly natural for them to take an implanted chip when the time comes in the future... And yes, that time WILL come...]
TIME report details legal ruling that befits activity of KGB or the East German Stasi
Steve Watson Infowars.net Wednesday, Aug 25th, 2010
A Report in TIME magazine details how it is now perfectly legal in nine states for the government to attach secret satellite tracking devices to your car and monitor you wherever you go, without a search warrant.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the report also details how The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which made the ruling, essentially suggests that privacy should be reserved for rich people only.
The law, which now applies in California and eight other Western states, stems from a case beginning in 2007 when federal agents of the DEA covertly attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle of an Oregon man they suspected of growing marijuana.
The vehicle was parked in the man’s driveway, yet judges ruled that he did not have any reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment because they driveway was “open to strangers” such as delivery people and neighborhood children.
This ruling transgresses long standing court rules that the area immediately surrounding a private property, known as the “curtilage,” should also be considered private.
Judges also ruled that there was no reasonable expectation that the government was not tracking the man’s movements.
All appeals against the court’s motion have failed.
One Ninth Circuit judge has spoken out against the ruling however, noting that it essentially suggests that privacy is limited to those who can afford to completely close off their property with hi-tech security features such as electric gates, fences and security booths to stop anyone, including the government, sneaking around.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski raised the point and added that “cultural elitism” is rife within the justice system:
“There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.”
“1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” Kozinski added, noting that “Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”
With a Justice Department on record suggesting that the Fourth Amendment does not apply after 9/11, and an intelligence apparatus guilty of widespread covert wiretapping of American citizens’ communications, one might suggest that we found ourselves living in such an Orwellian nightmare a long time ago, now it is simply being made official.
“…if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state – with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.” the TIME reporter and professional lawyer Adam Cohen writes, noting that due to differing decisions by courts in other districts, the issue is soon likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor at Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and regular contributor to Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Unilever's Omo detergent is adding an unusual ingredient to its two-pound detergent box in Brazil: a GPS device that allows its promotions agency Bullet to track shoppers and follow them to their front doors.
Starting next week, consumers who buy one of the GPS-implanted detergent boxes will be surprised at home, given a pocket video camera as a prize and invited to bring their families to enjoy a day of Unilever-sponsored outdoor fun. The promotion, called Try Something New With Omo, is in keeping with the brand's international "Dirt is Good" positioning that encourages parents to let their kids have a good time even if they get dirty.
Omo accounts for half of Brazil's detergent sales and is already found in 80% of homes there, so Unilever's goal is more to draw attention to a new stain-fighting version of Omo and get it talked about rather than looking for a big increase in sales...
Location-based services have superseded the real-time web as the driving force behind internet innovation this year.
Internet giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook are all honing their location-based services. These bigger companies are lining up alongside a healthy serving of smaller internet start-ups (think Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla and Booyah) to provide their consumers with comprehensive geolocation services.
Do you really want Facebook and Twitter giving away your location?
Location-based services have been the Next Big Thing for years, but the boom in GPS-enabled smartphones has really enabled the technology to take off. Both Facebook and Twitter are preparing to jump on the geo-spatial bandwagon, letting you attach your location details when you post a message. Sure it sounds cool, perhaps even useful, but has anyone stopped to ask whether it's a good idea?...
A 
