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Woman Gives Ridiculous Reason for Driving on Train Tracks

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By Fox News. . .Around 10 p.m. last Wednesday, the Duquesne Police Department responded to a call about “a vehicle on the railroad tracks” off State Route 837, the department wrote in a Facebook post.

Officers said a woman from Sewickley, roughly 15 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, had driven onto the tracks because “her GPS advised her to go this way.” (Read more from “Woman Gives Ridiculous Reason for Driving on Train Tracks” HERE)

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‘The GPS Told Me to Do It’: Woman Guided by GPS Drives onto Railroad Tracks, Police Say

By USA Today. Pennsylvania police say a woman who was following GPS directions veered off a road and onto railroad tracks, leaving her car stranded and resulting in a careless driving ticket.

The City of Duquesne Police Department posted about the incident to social media Wednesday, beginning the post “The GPS told me to do it…” The post includes a photo showing a disabled white sedan sitting on railroad tracks that run parallel to a multilane road.

The woman was “100% sober and had no medical conditions affecting her decision-making,” police say. . .

In the wake of Hurricane Florence, North Carolina officials warned that GPS apps were advising drivers to take routes that were flooded. “It is not safe now to trust (the travel apps) with your life,” the North Carolina Department of Transportation tweeted in September.

And in 2016, a driver who was following GPS directions turned too quickly and crashed — leaving the car suspended vertically on wires attached to a utility pole. No one was injured in that incident. (Read more from “‘The GPS Told Me to Do It’: Woman Guided by GPS Drives onto Railroad Tracks, Police Say” HERE)

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Cough Syrup With GPS Tracker Helps Police Nab Suspected Pharmacy Burglars

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The suspects had no idea that the bottle of cough syrup perched on a shelf at a Tustin pharmacy contained something more than cough relief.

It wasn’t until the nondescript package was removed from the small Newport Avenue business by burglars that its secret ingredients went to work.

Concealed inside the bottle of cough syrup was a GPS device that began tracking the medicine thieves’ every move, according to police investigators.

After days of tracking, undercover surveillance and evidence gathering, investigators arrested Willie James Clark, 21, of Roland Heights and Brian Vega Salinas, 20, of La Puente on suspicion of committing the Nov. 10 burglary. (Read more from “Cough Syrup With GPS Tracker Helps Police Nab Suspected Pharmacy Burglars” HERE)

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After 70% of Illegal Alien Families Fail to Show for Hearings, Feds Plan to Track Them with GPS

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Ankle BraceletThe Department of Homeland Security will reportedly track more illegal immigrants with GPS devices because a whopping 70% of illegal immigrants who traveled to America as a family unit failed to show up to their immigration hearings.

This summer, illegal immigrants from Central America flooded across the border, believing that “notices to appear” that illegal immigrants receive after being released were “permisos” to remain indefinitely in America. . .

According to an Associated Press report, as a result, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month launched a program to give GPS devices to some parents caught crossing the Mexican border illegally with their children in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.” The program will reportedly track 250 “heads of households” with GPS ankle bracelets.

Read more about tracking illegal alien families with GPS HERE.

Cops Use GPS Cannon to Track Your Car (+video)

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Photo Credit: WND Police cars across the country are being equipped with a system for tagging and tracking vehicles using Global Positioning System, or GPS, technology.

The StarChase system installs into the grille of a police car a compressed-air cannon, which can fire 4.5-inch GPS projectiles that stick to a parked or fleeing vehicle, using a high-grade adhesive. The GPS tags then enable the patrol car to back off, while computers at police headquarters track the suspect car’s movements.

The system was designed to eliminate the need for high-speed car chases, which are blamed for 360 deaths every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Trevor Fischbach, president of the Virginia Beach-Va.-based StarChase, told Industry Leaders magazine the system enables police to keep tabs on a fleeing suspect and plan how to apprehend him strategically, rather than race wildly after him.

“The agencies using StarChase report back that officer behavior across the entire on-duty patrol is totally different,” Fischbach commented. “Normally, when officers hear ‘pursuit in progress’ over their radios, they fly to the scene. StarChase reduces that adrenaline. Now, when they hear ‘StarChase’ over the radio, they stay put and wait for further instructions from dispatch.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Government Could Use Metadata to Map Your Every Move

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Photo Credit: Alex Garcia

Photo Credit: Alex Garcia

If you tweet a picture from your living room using your smartphone, you’re sharing far more than your new hairdo or the color of the wallpaper. You’re potentially revealing the exact coordinates of your house to anyone on the Internet.

The GPS location information embedded in a digital photo is an example of so-called metadata, a once-obscure technical term that’s become one of Washington’s hottest new buzzwords.

The word first sprang from the lips of pundits and politicians earlier this month, after reports disclosed that the government has been secretly accessing the telephone metadata of Verizon customers, as well as online videos, emails, photos and other data collected by nine Internet companies. President Barack Obama hastened to reassure Americans that “nobody is listening to your phone calls,” while other government officials likened the collection of metadata to reading information on the outside of an envelope, which doesn’t require a warrant.

But privacy experts warn that to those who know how to mine it, metadata discloses much more about us and our daily lives than the content of our communications.

Read more from this story HERE.

Paroled Sex Offenders Disarming Tracking Devices

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photo credit: photologue_npThousands of paroled child molesters, rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in California are removing or disarming their court-ordered GPS tracking devices — and some have been charged with new crimes including sexual battery, kidnapping and attempted manslaughter.

The offenders have discovered that they can disable the monitors, often with little risk of serving time for it, a Times investigation has found. The jails are too full to hold them. “It’s a huge problem,” said Fresno parole agent Matt Hill. “If the public knew, they’d be shocked.”

More than 3,400 arrest warrants for GPS tamperers have been issued since October 2011, when the state began referring parole violators to county jails instead of returning them to its packed prisons. Warrants increased 28% in 2012 compared to the 12 months before the change in custody began. Nearly all of the warrants were for sex offenders, who are the vast majority of convicts with monitors, and many were for repeat violations.

The custody shift is part of Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature’s “realignment” program, to comply with court orders to reduce overcrowding in state prisons. But many counties have been under their own court orders to ease crowding in their jails.

Some have freed parole violators within days, or even hours, of arrest rather than keep them in custody. Some have refused to accept them at all.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Normalizing GPS Tracking-Nestle Plants Trackers in Candy Bars

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In a European “contest,” Nestle has announced that it is placing GPS tracking devices in several candy bars that will activate some time after purchase, allowing Nestle to find the customer and award him or her over $15,000:

North Korean jamming of GPS shows critical system’s weakness

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Photo credit: kalleboo

U.S. and South Korean military commanders will be on the lookout for North Korean efforts to jam GPS signals as they take part in exercises on the divided peninsula this week and next.

North Korea repeatedly has jammed GPS signals in South Korea, which has “very serious implications” because U.S. and South Korean military system rely on the navigation system, said Bruce Bennett, a North Korea scholar for the California think tank Rand Corp.

The jamming also underscores the vulnerability of a satellite-based tool on which civilian systems from car navigation to air traffic control rely upon.

North Koreans have used Russian-made, truck-mounted jamming gear near the border to disrupt low-power GPS signals in large swaths of South Korea. By broadcasting powerful radio signals on the same frequencies as the satellites, the jammers drown out the GPS signals.

Mr. Bennett said the jamming has occurred three times in the past two years and has coincided with joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises.The timing strongly suggests the jamming was “an experiment … a test … to let [the North Koreans] see what effect it would have and maybe disrupt the exercises,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Federal Appellate Court: No warrant needed to track you in real time by your cell phone

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Photo credit: from_ko

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that police do not need a warrant to track the location of a suspect’s phone.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not violate the constitutional rights of Melvin Skinner when they collected his phone’s GPS data.

DEA agents tracked Skinner’s pay-as-you-go phone as he transported drugs between Arizona and Tennessee. They arrested him at a rest stop in Texas with a motorhome filled with more than 1,100 pounds of marijuana.

Skinner’s lawyers argued that the police violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches by collecting his phone’s GPS data without first obtaining a warrant.

But the appeals court ruled that Skinner has no reasonable expectation of privacy for his cellphone’s location data.

Read more from this story HERE.

GPS expert stuns Congress: Drones in US airspace can easily be hijacked by criminals, terrorists

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A House Homeland Security subcommittee today heard sharp warnings about the plan to allow drones to fly widely in U.S. airspace starting in 2015.

GPS expert Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas was the star witness: “I am worried that it could be a weapon in the arsenal of organized crime, or state actors, or organized terrorists,“ Humphreys told a stunned committee.

In a Fox News exclusive last month, Humphreys demonstrated how, with a relatively inexpensive GPS “spoofer,” he could take control of a GPS-guided drone in flight, and make it do whatever he wanted. The potential is there, he told the panel, for terrorists to do the same thing.

“The nightmare situation that I articulated here as a panelist,” Humphreys told Fox News, “was that five or ten years from now we haven’t fixed the problem and now the drones are much larger, maybe delivering FedEx packages. I don’t want it to get to that point before we say ‘ok it’s a problem.’”

Committee Chairman Rep. Mike McCaul of Texas was clearly alarmed by Humphreys’ testimony:  “This is astounding that you could hijack a UAV and bring it down,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.