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By Greg Bartlett

It used to be that ascertaining the whereabouts of a suspect – verifying an alibi, whether it’s a criminal case, or a private investigator investigating a marital infidelity – was a long, involved process. You had to corner witnesses, get sworn affidavits, and corroborate testimony and more. If the police or the private investigator were lucky, the suspect got stuck on tape with a date stamp by some security camera along their route.

What’s changed is Global Positioning Satellite technology. Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) form a constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Each satellite broadcasts a signal that has the time it was broadcast encoded in it. The delay between when it was broadcast and when it was received can, when correlated with several other satellites, track how long the signal took to reach the transceiver. This can help locate the position (provided there are at least two signals) of an object to within a meter or sometimes less. While it sounds like science fiction, it’s been a military technology since the 1980s, and has moved into the commercial realm since the late 1990s. It is moving towards becoming a ‘commonplace feature’ in devices ranging from cell phones to handheld gaming consoles…and most importantly, in cars.

GPS-enabled (or dual system, GPS-and-cell-tower) tracking systems are becoming common add-ons to cars above a certain price range. They’ve also become items that can be remotely attached to cars, though it’s a bit trickier. The car body can block the reception of the satellite signals if the receiver isn’t in place. Currently, there are no regulations forbidding putting one of these devices on a car that you don’t own, but this may require an affidavit of probable cause in the future. What these do for law enforcement and private investigations is provide a transcript of where the car was driven, at what times, and where it stopped (and for how long). An invesigative tracking device makes a causal chain of events that is very difficult to wiggle out of in a court room. It’s the equivalent of putting the suspect on continuous surveillance.

While GPS tracking technology makes the jobs of police much simpler, it has several ramifications for society at large. Things that most people never consider are now being routinely monitored, recorded and analyzed. This has been a trend since the inception of cheap, powerful computers. GPS tracking systems are the next step in the trend, and will cause thorny issues in law enforcement and civil libertarian circles for years to come.