The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it.
Two days later, FBI agents arrived at Afifi’s Santa Clara apartment and demanded the return of their property — a global positioning system tracking device now at the center of a raging legal debate over privacy rights.
One federal judge wrote that the widespread use of the device was straight out of George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”
“By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn’t impair an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives,” wrote Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in a blistering dissent in which a three-judge panel from his court ruled that search warrants weren’t necessary for GPS tracking.
But other federal and state courts have come to the opposite conclusion. Law enforcement advocates for the devices say GPS can eliminate time-consuming stakeouts and old-fashioned “tails” with unmarked police cars. The technology had a starring role in the HBO cops-and-robbers series “The Wire” and police use it to track every type of suspect — from terrorist to thieves stealing copper from air conditioners.
That investigators don’t need a warrant to use GPS tracking devices in California troubles privacy advocates, technophiles, criminal defense attorneys and others.
George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr said the issue boils down to public vs. private. As long as the GPS devices are attached to vehicles on public roads, Kerr believes the US Supreme Court will decide no warrant is needed. To decide otherwise, he said, would ignore a long line of previous 4th Amendment decisions allowing for warrantless searches as long as they’re conducted on public property.
“The historic line is that public surveillance is not covered by the 4th Amendment,” which limits unreasonable search and seizures by the US government, Kerr said.
All of which makes Afifi’s lawyer pessimistic that he has much of a chance to file a successful lawsuit challenging the FBI’s actions. Afifi is represented by Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Islamic civil rights group.
Billoo hopes the discovered GPS tracking device will help publicize in dramatic fashion the issue of racial profiling the lawyer says Arab-Americans routinely encounter.
She said Afifi was targeted because of his extensive ties to the Middle East, which include supporting two brothers who live in Egypt and making frequent overseas trips. His father was a well-known Islamic-American community leader who died last year in Egypt.
“Yasir hasn’t done anything to warrant that kind of surveillance,” Billoo said. “This was a blatant example of profiling.”
