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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
An Indiana man may beat a drug prosecution after the state's highest court threw out a search warrant against him late last week. The search warrant was based on the idea that the man had "stolen" a GPS tracking device belonging to the government. But Indiana's Supreme Court concluded that he'd done no such thing—and the cops should have known it.
Last November, we wrote about the case of Derek Heuring, an Indiana man the Warrick County Sheriff's Office suspected of selling meth. Authorities got a warrant to put a GPS tracker on Heuring's car, getting a stream of data on his location for six days. But then the data stopped.
Officers suspected Heuring had discovered and removed the tracking device. After waiting for a few more days, they got a warrant to search his home and a barn belonging to his father. They argued the disappearance of the tracking device was evidence that Heuring had stolen it.
During their search, police found the tracking device and some methamphetamine. They charged Heuring with drug-related crimes as well as theft of the GPS device.
But at trial, Heuring's lawyers argued that the warrant to search the home and barn had been illegal. An application for a search warrant must provide probable cause to believe a crime was committed. But removing a small, unmarked object from your personal vehicle is no crime at all, Heuring's lawyers argued. Heuring had no way of knowing what the device was or who it belonged to—and certainly no obligation to leave the device on his vehicle.
An Indiana appeals court ruled against Heuring last year. But Indiana's Supreme Court seemed more sympathetic to Heuring's case during oral arguments last November.
"I'm really struggling with how is that theft," said Justice Steven David during November's oral arguments.
The appeals court[*] decision is available online as a pdf.
Also at: Washington Post and The Indiana Lawyer.
[*] Updated at 2020-02-26 01:16:51 UTC. Previously, this link suggested it was to the decision by the Indiana Supreme Court. This was, in fact, a link to the decision from the Indiana Appeals Court. We regret the error.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday February 26 2020, @12:02PM
I'd like to know how any GPS in the car is related to what the police can access remotely.
I have a GPS, built right into the on-board entertainment. There is literally no way, however, to access that car remotely. About the closest you could get in theory would be a Bluetooth connection, but my car doesn't offer Bluetooth, only connects to registered devices, and doesn't offer any service by audio over Bluetooth, and doesn't have any other way to "talk home" (even the "air bag deployed" emergency contact requires my phone to be tethered to it to operate). Even if I want to "update", it's an SD card in a slot, not over-the-air.
My car is a 2018 model.
So unless these guys are literally hacking cars from 5m away without arousing suspicions, via unpublished compromises, the provide GPS history over the Bluetooth, they wouldn't be able to do much with my car. Police DO NOT have access to most cars. Maybe some stupidly designed ones, but that's an entirely other matter and criminals worth catching tend not to be too stupid.
There's a reason they plant their own tracker on it, rather than rely on the car to do anything.
Stop buying stupidly designed cars, or conflating "GPS" with "talk-home computers communicating over 4G back to a central station, 24 hours a day". The latter is a problem. The former is just a satnav.