GPS: The New German Shepherd

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/srNHF)
By Greg Bartlett

For years police officers and officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have been using a variety of tactics to track down drugs and drug dealers.  One of the most commonly recognized “tactic” is the intelligent German Shepherd dog.  You have probably seen officers walking their dogs and allowing them to sniff around to locate drugs on a person or in a container.  Law enforcement officers are now taking a new approach.

[caption id="attachment_5067" align="alignright" width="396" caption="GPS Likened to German Shepherd"][/caption]

Many of these officers are using GPS tracking devices to find drugs and drug dealers.  There was a recent report of a well-known attorney that was suspected of dealing drugs.  However, because of his high profile within polite society, it was nearly impossible to apprehend him with enough evidence to accuse him of the crime.  Police in his area turned to using GPS tracking devices.  At this point, law enforcement officers do not need a warrant or police order to install a tracker on an asset or a vehicle.

In this case, the officers placed a tracker on the attorney’s car, and they tracked his car’s activity for about a month.  Eventually, as police monitored the car, they were able to catch the attorney in the middle of a drug deal.  He was arrested and prosecuted.  Because of the accuracy of the GPS tracking device, one more drug dealer is off the streets.

GPS tracking devices use the satellites in space to help them receive and transmit information as to the exact location and travel patterns of the vehicle or asset that is currently carrying the tracker.  The tracker is placed on the car or asset, and it transmits information to the satellite, the satellite receives that information and sends it to the receiver, which is any web-enabled device such as a cell phone or a computer.

There are three different kinds of GPS tracking devices:  data loggers, data pushers, and data pullers.  Data loggers are also known as passive trackers; they simply record, or log, information on the device.  The information can be retrieved later using the USB port on the end of the device.  Data pushers and pullers are real time trackers; they can send (push) the car’s location intermittently, or you can pull (request) the car’s location at whatever point you wish to see it.

In the case of the drug-dealing attorney, the law enforcement officers placed the real time GPS tracking device on his car, and they could easily have tracked his travel patterns and location on a laptop inside their patrol cars.