The IT Nerd

Hacker News has an interesting report that illustrates the fact that cars that are “connected” in some way have been the targets of spying by law enforcement. Now I put the word “connected” in quotes because some of the cases that are cited pre-date the times when cars became “things” on the Internet. Instead, the cars were “connected” in other ways. For example, cops have leveraged SiriusXM radios in cars to get evidence:

In 2014, satellite radio and telematics provider SiriusXM provided location information of a Toyota 4-Runner following a warrant by New York police, which was recently unsealed.

The warrant asked SiriusXM “to activate and monitor as a tracking device the SIRIUS XM Satellite Radio installed on the Target Vehicle” for ten days, and the company admitted to Forbes that it complied with the order.

How did SiriusXM achieve this? The company simply turned on the stolen vehicle recovery feature of its Connected Vehicle Services technology on the target vehicle, Toyota 4-Runner. It’s like Apple turning on the Find My iPhone feature to track a customer’s location, the court documents [PDF] says.

SiriusXM said it worked with law enforcement periodically to provide such information on its customers with just a valid warrant. The company receives an estimated five valid court orders a year to monitor a suspect, though it declined to offer on-record comment.

If you have a GM vehicle, you likely have OnStar which cops have leveraged as well to get evidence. Here’s one example:

According to Forbes, police asked GM to hand over OnStar data in December 2009 from a Chevrolet Tahoe rented by suspected crack cocaine dealer Riley Dantzler.

OnStar’s tracking is so accurate that even after the feds had no idea about Dantzler’s car, it’s able to “identify that vehicle among the many that were on Interstate 20 that evening,” followed him from Houston, Texas, to Ouachita Parish, stopped Dantzler and found cocaine, ecstasy and a gun inside the car.

Lovely. Another example is cited as well. The interesting part about that is the fact that the target of this was not an OnStar subscriber, but the hardware was still live. Something that I wrote about in part a few years ago. For the record, here’s GM’s stance on this:

“We don’t monitor or otherwise track the location of OnStar-equipped cars unless required by a valid court order in criminal procedures or under exigent circumstances; and we don’t release the number of those requests. We take our customers’ privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we assist them on average more than 600 times each month in North America with some form of Stolen Vehicle Assistance.”

Now if all of this is going on, one has to wonder what would happen if a hacker was able to leverage this for some nefarious purpose. Never mind the fact that there’s data inside your car that someone could use against you legally. This illustrates the need for substantive rules around this sort of thing. The question is whether those who make those rules see this as a priority.