Posts Tagged ‘satellite imagery’

It has come up in many a court whether or not tracking a suspect with a GPS tracker is legal. Is it a breach of the fourth amendment? Is a tracker a form of “unreasonable searches”? Need it be dependent on a warrant “upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation”? Is it in violation of the clause “describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”, because you can’t exactly specify where you will search someone if you are tracking them? All words in quotations come directly from the Constitution, the legal body that almost 350 years after composition our nation still follows.

If the words are taken literally, then it would be almost impossible to use a GPS-enabled tracker to assist in the capturing of a suspected criminal. A tracker in any shape or form would qualify as an unreasonable search by most legal definitions. Any covert tracking generally requires special permission by a legal enforcement authoritative figure. The thing is, issuing a warrant for a GPS tracker would be problematic. There’s almost no way to describe what’s going to be tracked and where, and the whole point of the warrant is that it must be as specific as possible to ensure a legal search.

The dilemma has been brought to court before by suspects that felt that they were violated. They appealed their cases to some of the country’s thirteen federal Court of Appeals. The 7th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of a criminal found guilty on proof that was documented by a GPS tracker. The defendant claimed that such surreptitious tracking was an “unreasonable search”. The courts ruled that placing a tracking device on a car does not qualify as a “search or seizure” because they equated the device to a police car physically tailing the vehicle. The judge reasoned, “if police follow a car around, or observe its route by means of cameras mounted on lampposts or by satellite imaging as in Google Earth, there is no search”. From that ruling, issuing a warrant wouldn’t be necessary.

There was a difference of opinion between the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals to that of the D.C. Circuit. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote a 41 page opinion as to why he and his two fellow judges chose the verdict that favored privacy. “It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even to follow someone during a single journey as he goes to the market or returns home from work,” Ginsburg wrote. “It is another thing entirely for that stranger to pick up the scent again the next day and the day after that, week in and week out, dogging his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.” He felt that GPS tracking was equivalent to the kind of police tracking that requires a warrant.

There’s only one court above the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court. Being as that there is no official verdict yet, it is entirely up to the national court to announce a verdict to apply in all 50 states. It will be interesting to learn the conclusion when the next historic decision is announced.

Over the past few years, the use of GPS technology has been very effective in the world of law enforcement, but only recently has it been applied to fire fighting as well. Slowly but surely, more and more fire departments are adopting these GPS systems as part of their fire fighting gear on account of many benefits, as will be discussed below.

To begin with, there are multiple reasons as to why navigation GPS units are being built into fire trucks. First, it allows them to arrive at the scene of a fire in the shortest possible time, which, needless to say, it’s crucial. Second, these devices are able to provide the locations of all fire hydrants, water lines, gas lines, and electrical service lines anywhere near the fire, allowing the fire fighters to assess the situation ahead of time which helps them better prepare for how they will respond.

These new GPS devices can also provide fire fighters with satellite imagery of large fires – such as forest fires or oil fires – from which they can see and determine which areas most immediately need to be put out, and can plan the most efficient way of putting out the fire accordingly.

In addition, in the event that outside firefighters from another area are called in for extra support, these GPS devices can not only aid them in navigating through unfamiliar territory, but also help different firefighters better communicate and relay positions to one another via satellite uplink. During a dangerous blaze, all fire departments can be monitored simultaneously, so knowing where all your units are at the same time becomes very easy, which is important and essential knowledge.

There are also plans to attach personal GPS trackers to each individual fireman to ensure that no one is ever left behind. If a fireman, thus, ever finds himself in trouble from a dangerous fire, within seconds he can activate a distress beacon, informing his fellow fight fighters that something has gone wrong and that he’s in need of help.

All of this new GPS technology will enable our fire fighters to act more efficiently in the fight against fires, which in turn will help them save even more innocent lives.

In today’s modern era, GPS systems can be used for almost anything; car navigation, personal tracking, law enforcement, etc. But recently, scientists have discovered a way to use GPS systems to improve agriculture. It’s called precision agriculture, and it does just what the name implies. Using satellite imagery, farming specialists can get an aerial view of their massive fields, which can reveal a plethora of crucial information. Using this bird’s eye view of their land, they can find exactly where their crops aren’t growing, as well as where would be the best places to plant their crops.

This new use of GPS technology is growing fast, and slowly more and more farmers are adopting these new farming methods. This new technology can also save farmers tons of money, at least $1,300 dollars per year, by reducing the amount of crops they lose every year.

Scientists say that if 10% of farmers in the United States adopt this new method of farming, 16 million gallons of fuel will be saved per year, as well as 4 million pounds of pesticide and 2 million quarts of herbicide. Precision agriculture was invented around 15 years ago, back before the field of GPS satellite imagery was not fully developed yet. Today, now that GPS satellite images can be presented in crystal clear HD quality, precision agriculture has become much more mainstream.

As with all new technology, precision agriculture faces many obstacles ahead. First of all, many farmers don’t like having their farms photographed via satellite because they believe it will allow their competitors to spy on their fields. Another problem these developers face is sunspots. A sunspot a period when a small portion of the sun flares up, causing a break in all satellite and radio signals. Usually, sunspots are very rare, but unfortunately for these farmers, we are about to enter a year full of sunspot activity. High sunspot activity usually occurs in 11 year cycles, and the last high sunspot year was 2001, which means by the year 2012, this satellite imagery technology will be rendered almost absolutely obsolete for a full year.

The road ahead seems tough for precision agriculture, but if there is one thing that is absolute about technology, it is that it never stops progressing.