With GPS tracking all over the news after it was reported that iPhones, smartphones, and other mobile devices were tracking user’s movements, fix-it-yourself website ifixit added their grain of salt by performing one of their now-famous teardowns on an FBI tracking device mounted on animal rights and environmental activist’s car by federal agents calling her a "left-wing anarchist."

The interesting teardown of the FBI’s tracking device comes amid a heightened debate on privacy laws and organizations’ capacity to track users and citizens’ movements. Beyond the GPS tracking scandal that hit Apple and the continued debate over Google’s location information, the issue has gone onto federal forums with the Obama administration pushing to get law enforcers cleared of the need for a warrant to track citizens, according to Wired.

An Arab-America citizen called Yasir Afifi sued the FBI for violating his privacy rights by placing a tracking device on his car without a warrant because of his racial background. Afifi‘s suit was along the lines of federal judge Alex Kozinski’s thoughts on GPS tracking, who called the use of GPS devices without a court order “straight out of George Orwell’s 1984.” The Obama Administration filed a writ in April asking the Supreme Court to review ruling, pushing to get warrantless-tracking approved and thus not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

ifixit got its hand on the FBI GPS device after Kathy Thomas, the activist who was being tailed, read about the Afifi case and gave the transmitter, which the Fed’s had requested be returned, to Wired. The device, composed of a GPS unit for receiving the car’s position, an RF transmitter for relaying location to the FBI, and a set of D-cell batteries, was attached to the car via “extremely powerful magnets. Some were so stubbornly attached that they ripped out of the mounting brackets to forever remain stuck on the undercarriage of the host vehicle,” read the teardown.

The device, which appears to have been “FBI hand-soldered,” was powered by an ancient GPS processing module called µ-blox GPS-MS1 released in June 1999. ifixit reports that the screws securing the outer case of the transmitter/receiver “were coated with so much threadlocker that we had to break out the power drill and eliminate the screw heads,” indicating that the FBI was serious about keeping anyone from tampering with the innards of their tracking device.

“The FBI will find you if you find their tracking device,” warn the experts at ifixit. Their claim appears to be true, both Afifi and Thomas were confronted by Fed’s asking for their devices back. Thomas, who had been called a “left-wing anarchist” by the FBI, had noticed she was being tailed and had engaged in countersurveillance maneuvers which led her to identifying two federal agents. Her lawyer “called a local U.S. attorney to inquire about the device, the prosecutor acknowledged it belonged to the feds and said they wanted it back. But Thomas refused to hand it over, and the FBI seemed to drop the matter.”

In the case of Afifi, who discovered the device after taking his car for an oil change, the FBI showed up at his apartment to demand that he return the tracking device. Afifi had put pictures of the device on reddit.com, where readers identified it was a GPS tracking device.

The use of GPS tracking devices without a warrant appears as another flagrant abuse of people’s right to privacy based on the arbitrary volition of law enforcement agencies. According to a piece in Time, the government tried to justify the use of GPS tracking devices on two flimsy claims.

First, that if the GPS device is attached on a vehicle in an area open to strangers, or not one’s private property, then no warrant is needed. The other, that once a GPS device is planted, the government is free to track people without a warrant.

Interestingly enough, the judge who most loudly spoke against the flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment, Kozinski, was a conservative judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan. To add a final twist to the story, the Obama administration, one of the most liberal to hold the presidency in recent memory, is fighting against Kozinski on the issue. Quite an ironic turn as civil liberties are trampled on by the federal government.