Where Are We? - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 157

in the United States, more than 4.88 million, is under criminal justice supervi-
sion outside a correctional facility. 72 The number of people who wear or carry
some type of court-ordered electronic monitor grew fivefold, to one hundred
thousand, between 1999 and 2006 and by the end of the decade reached an
estimated two hundred thousand. 73 The trend has fueled substantial growth
among early players in electronic offender monitoring, attracting multinational
public corporations to the business. Colorado-based bi (founded in 1978 as
Behavior Interventions), with about a third of the U.S. market, tracks more
than sixty thousand offenders through contracts with about nine hundred fed-
eral, state, and local agencies in all fifty states. 74 The geo Group, a $1.6 billion
global provider of correctional, detention, and treatment services to all levels
of government, acquired bi in 2011 for $415 million. 75 Former U.S. drug czar
and Florida governor Bob Martinez cofounded Pro Tech Monitoring in Tampa
in 1996. 76 An Israeli company, Dmatek Group, which already owned U.S. mon-
itoring subsidiary Elmo-Tech, bought Pro Tech Monitoring in 2007 for $12.5
million. 77 Dmatek rebranded itself as Attenti in 2010, and then 3m, a diversi-
fied worldwide conglomerate with $29.6 billion in sales, acquired Attenti in
2011 for about $230 million. 78 In 2011 the top three offender tracking compa-
nies posted combined sales exceeding $61 million. bi posted sales of $26.8
million, and Attenti finished the year with $16.4 million. 79 Relative newcomer
SecureAlert, a Utah company founded in 2006, recorded $17.96 million in
sales. 80 At least a half-dozen other vendors compete for a share of the market.
Privacy versus Secrecy
As tracking proved useful for those already in the justice system, police stepped
up gps use in criminal investigations. Vehicles impounded after an arrest often
have a navigation system from which forensic investigators can tease a stored
digital “breadcrumb” trail of its movements. 81 Before an arrest, detectives
could attach magnetic trackers to vehicles without alerting a suspect or seek-
ing a judge's permission, and the technology gave police forces, particularly
smaller ones with fewer resources, an affordable tool to track suspects, gener-
ate evidence, and close cases. For example, police in Fairfax County and Alex-
andria, Virginia, halted a series of a dozen assaults on women in 2008 after
placing a gps tracker on a van belonging to a suspect living near the crime
scenes—a convicted rapist who had served seventeen years in prison. They
later caught him dragging a woman from the van into some woods and made
an arrest, after which the assaults ended. 82 Civil libertarians and defense law-