10-8-2010College student finds FBI tracking device on his car

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online.

Afifi, the son of an Islamic-American community leader who died a year ago in Egypt, is one of only a few people known to have found a government-tracking device on their vehicle.

His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it’s legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect’s car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.

Brian Alseth from the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state contacted Afifi after seeing pictures of the tracking device posted online and told him the ACLU had been waiting for a case like this to challenge the ruling.

“This is the kind of thing we like to throw lawyers at,” Afifi said Alseth told him.

“It seems very frightening that the FBI have placed a surveillance-tracking device on the car of a 20-year-old American citizen who has done nothing more than being half-Egyptian,” Alseth told Wired.com

A reader quickly identified it as an Orion Guardian ST820 tracking device made by an electronics company called Cobham, which sells the device only to law enforcement.

The female agent, who handed Afifi a card, identified herself as Jennifer Kanaan and said she was Lebanese. She spoke some Arabic to Afifi and through the course of her comments indicated she knew what restaurants he and his girlfriend frequented. She also congratulated him on his new job. Afifi recently got laid off from his job, but on the same day was hired as an international sales manager of laptops and computers for Cal Micro in San Jose.

The agents also knew he was planning a short business trip to Dubai in a few weeks. Afifi said he often travels for business and has two teenage brothers in Egypt whom he supports financially. They live with an aunt. His U.S.-born mother, who divorced his father five years ago, lives in Arizona.

Afifi’s father, Aladdin Afifi, was a U.S. citizen and former president of the Muslim Community Association here, before his family moved to Egypt in 2003. Yasir Afifi returned to the U.S. alone in 2008, while his father and brothers stayed in Egypt, to further his education he said. He knows he’s on a federal watchlist and is regularly taken aside at airports for secondary screening.

Six months ago, a former roommate of his was visited by FBI agents who said they wanted to speak with Afifi. Afifi contacted one agent and was told the agency received an anonymous tip from someone saying he might be a threat to national security. Afifi told the agent he was willing to answer questions if his lawyer approved. But after Afifi’s lawyer contacted the agency, he never heard from the feds again until he found their tracking device.

Photo of tracking device courtesy of Yasir Afifi

Yo, just be glad that the law doesn't require all cars to have government-issued tracking devices.. YET! I have a strong feeling that the police will rally so hard for it, and push the lobby-makers to pass the bill.

See, the police need to know everything about what is going on the public roads. All vehicles that enter the roads are required to be registered by the owner, so I don't think it will be long before the police decide that it's easier to have the GPS track all cars (how fast they are going, if any of them are driving erratically, where a hit-and-run driver would be at after being reported by witnesses, how frequently a car passes the red light/stop sign when they were not supposed to, a more accurate location of where the accident happened.. blah blah.. ). Heck, there are satellites that can view the streets of the nation, but they would probably find it cheaper to just implement a built-in automated GPS tracking device in every registered car in the US. Maybe the transition will be slow, but then again, I do not think the gov't will have a very hard time passing a law that requires it to be built into all new cars in the US, even including used cars sold by dealers. True, criminals could still take it out, even if it's deeply ingrained into the transmission or the engine itself, but let's say that a new kind of car battery has a GPS "relay" feature in it that if the GPS is taken out, the battery will send a signal to the police that the GPS is either not working or present.

The government is probably working on the hack-proof engineering concepts right now. There will be several proposals on this soon. We're being watched anyways--no man is alone in this overpopulated world. We cannot keep our fingerprints private, to ourselves, so as more tech is developed, the more it is used for AND against us, but an average law-abiding citizen would usually have less to worry about, given greater security in the surrounding environment.

All your base belongs to us

I was pretty shocked to read this. But I guess if you have nothing to hide and you are legit, then you are OK ?

Yeah, soon there will be satellites monitoring every inch of the entire nation (and the FBI can already get satellites to monitor quite a bit). So, what do we have to say against this?

It does piss me off when I swim naked at a beach with my wife. One time, there was a helicopter full of Coast Guard infirmary, and they waved right at us with maxed-out smiles on their faces, flying so low across the water (about 150 feet high). We were in crystal clear water, only a few feet deep off a secluded beach. Dammit, man! Must've been good porn for them..

lol, who's to stop them. But you got the conclusion right.

Swim with something on if you are concerned.

Oh Oh ... Coast Guard .. they were checking Bo out probably

I used to live in singapor and i know that in the cars they place a sort of sensor and every time u drive through a gate they would know where you are what your doing and how fast your going.... these gates where everywhere btw

If the student gets to keep the device then there is no problem. But if the FBI tries to get the device back, now that's a problem.

I think the article was it was about them wanting it back and I believe he did give it back.