For weeks, when Connie Adams drove her car she knew it wouldn’t be long before her ex-boyfriend showed up.
He’d pop up when she was on dates. He’d be outside the cafe where she went for her morning cup of coffee before work. He’d track her down at restaurants she had never visited before.
“I wondered how he could just be there,” Adams testified recently during a preliminary hearing in Wisconsin for stalking suspect Paul Seidler.
It was when Adams recalled seeing an unusual icon marked “Smart Track” on Seidler’s computer months earlier that an answer began to click.
After telling police about the icon, a detective looked underneath the hood of her 1999 Chevrolet Cavalier and found a small black box near the radiator.
The box contained a high-tech device called a global positioning system, or GPS, which can relay the real-time location of anything it’s attached to via a computer or a cell phone.
The use of the satellite-fed monitoring device in the Wisconsin case sent shivers through domestic-violence workers nationwide.
It was one of the first times they had ever heard of anyone using a GPS device to stalk a former girlfriend.
Now they worry there will be more.
Particularly troubling is that many existing stalking laws don’t address the use of the sophisticated spying tools, providing a virtual Peeping Tom loophole for offenders.
“It very much concerns our organization because it means victims are still in jeopardy and offenders aren’t being held accountable,” said Tracy Bahm, director of the Stalking Resource Center in Washington, D.C.
The gap in law enforcement responding to technology being used for criminal purposes was immediately evident in the Wisconsin case.
While Seidler was charged with felony stalking in January, there was no law on the books to address his use of the global positioning system to commit the alleged crime.
“There just wasn’t anything specific that was available,” said Susan Karaskiewicz, Kenosha County’s deputy district attorney.
An increasing problem
So prosecutors are planning to use the fact that Seidler employed the device at a sentencing hearing–if he’s convicted. His trial is scheduled to begin Monday.
“I definitely think it’s an aggravating factor because this was helping him out, and escalating the fear of the victim,” she said.
The rise in stories about the use of computers, electronic devices and satellite technology is linked directly to their increasing use in the workplace, as well as a drop in the once sky-high price of the tools.
Exact figures aren’t available, but stalking experts estimate somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the nation’s more than 1.5 million annual stalking cases involve the use of computers or other high-tech devices.
“We’ve definitely seen a lot more cases of stalkers using high-tech resources,” said Teresa Miranda, acting director of the Violence Against Women Program at the American Prosecutor’s Research Institute in Arlington, Va.
“It’s not only cheaper, but people are becoming more technologically savvy so it’s easier for them to use to stalk victims,” Miranda said, noting that less than five years ago such incidents were relatively rare.
Still, in many cases the fact that technology is being used to stalk is often overlooked.
“It’s such an emerging area of crime that some victims don’t realize technology’s being misused, and prosecutors don’t know to ask about it,” said Cindy Southworth, a technology expert at the National Network to End Domestic Violence who trains local, state and federal law-enforcement authorities on the issue.
“Cyberstalking” laws were adopted in most states during the 1990s to address the increasing use of computers to threaten victims, mostly by transmitting harassing e-mail messages or hacking into personal files.
But only a handful of states–Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Hawaii and South Carolina–have drafted laws that specifically mention the use of surveillance devices as an act of stalking or harassment. As a result, prosecutors often use other laws banning harassment, invasion of privacy or trespassing in stalking cases.
“When a batterer misuses technology to harm a victim, eavesdropping, wire-tapping, harassment or other laws may apply,” Southworth said. “There is almost always a way to prosecute these crimes by creatively looking at the code book.”
In Atlanta last year, burglary charges were added to aggravated stalking charges placed against a man who broke into his ex-girlfriend’s home to hide a video recorder in her bedroom.
That option didn’t exist for Wisconsin authorities handling the satellite-stalking case. The small metal-encased GPS device was found under the hood of the woman’s car after she told police she recalled seeing the Smart Track icon on Seidler’s laptop computer.
Seidler had bought the device for about $1,300 from a store in McHenry, where they’re manufactured.
“Everything clicked when she saw that weird icon,” Karaskiewicz said. “She realized that’s how he knew where she was going, even when she just went out on an unplanned errand.” Although unusual, it wasn’t the first time such a device had been used in a stalking case. A Colorado man was convicted of stalking two years ago after he secretly installed a GPS in his ex-wife’s car. A similar case was reported in New Jersey last year.
Spelling it out in laws
The highly publicized incidents now have some state and federal lawmakers trying to make sure the use of spying technology is incorporated into criminal laws.
Concern over a video-stalking case in Louisiana prompted Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to introduce legislation in Congress last year to make secretly videotaping a person in “intimate situations” a federal crime.
Landrieu introduced the bill after the neighbor of a Louisiana couple was arrested for planting a hidden video camera in the attic of their home and cutting holes through the ceiling of their bedroom.
The 1999 incident became the subject of a Lifetime TV movie, “Video Voyeur: The Susan Wilson Story.”
Landrieu’s bill would make “video voyeurism” a federal crime punishable by up to three years in prison.
Illinois recently adopted a law making it illegal to videotape anyone without their consent in various places, including homes, restrooms, tanning beds, changing rooms and hotel bedrooms. Still, there’s no way to stop someone from buying high-tech surveillance devices–except his or her wallet. The tracking unit used in the Wisconsin case sells for $1,200 to $3,000.
“It’s like something out of `Mission Impossible,’ but it’s not illegal to buy one,” said attorney John Schiro, who is defending the alleged stalker in the Wisconsin case.
The devices can be easily purchased in electronics stores, from catalogs or online. Items that sold for thousands of dollars just a few years ago now sell for only hundreds.
Experts question whether anything can be done to keep a determined stalker from using high-tech tools. And the ingenuity stalkers have displayed using the devices is confounding even veteran stalking experts.
“These guys are getting so good at stalking they’re almost one step ahead of the technology we’re developing to try to stop it,” said Bridget Healy Ryan, a Cook County prosecutor who has handled hundreds of stalking cases involving typical cyber-stalking incidents like computer hacking and threatening e-mails.
As a defense against cyberstalkers, authorities recommend such steps as using Caller ID and keeping computers free of vital identifying information.
Concerned about the rise in use of cyberstalking techniques, many advocates for stalking victims say they are uncomfortable discussing the new techniques employed by some perpetrators.
“We don’t want to plant any seeds,” said Bahm of the Stalking Resource Center, echoing the sentiments of other advocates.
But others argue that the seeds have already been planted, which is why now is the time to address the problem.
“The activity of a stalker is limited only to their imagination, opportunity and motivation,” said Paul Wynn, a former Nashville police lieutenant who now is a consultant to anti-stalking organizations around the country.
“Sophisticated technology is just one more tool a stalker will use against a victim. The end result is the same.”
