HOUSTON – Rob Kimmons is a professional spy — the kind jilted husbands and wives pay to track, monitor, and bust cheating spouses.

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“Our job is not always that difficult,” Kimmons said. “Some people, they just don’t really (care). They’re not very careful especially considering they’re married.”

A lot has changed since Kimmons first started in the business back in 1981.

From social networking sites like Facebook to tracking devices that private investigators can mount on the cheaters car and follow, technology is making it easier to document the kind of behavior that makes divorce lawyers smile.

But no matter how advanced things get, it’s hard to argue with good old fashion video proof.

Kimmons has a library of cheaters from closed cases of years past. Videos that show wives and husbands doing things that would make a soap opera writer blush.

Kimmons caught one wife sneaking out of her house in the middle of the night while her husband and children slept.

“She would walk down the street because she couldn’t drive out of the driveway with her husband there,” he said. “And (she would) borrow a car.”

Then she’d drive over to a bar, have a few drinks with the bartender, then have a few minutes of extramarital sex with him in that car she borrowed from her neighbor.

“You even see her throwing the condom out the window,” Kimmons says. “In a minute she gets on top of him and everything. It’s just so blatant.”

The video appears to catch six whole minutes of front seat lovemaking in a Walgreens parking lot.

“If you’re gonna do something that stupid in a public place, then we can film it, we can tape record it, because you’re doing it in a public place,” said FOX 26 legal analyst Chris Tritico.

But there are things that by law, a private investigator as well as a suspecting spouse can not do.

“If you want to follow your spouse, follow them,” Tritico said. “If you want to get your friends to follow your spouse in public, have your friends follow your spouse. But don’t hack into their computer. Don’t hack into their cell phone. Don’t act like you’re someone else on social networking devices. All of those things are gonna get you in trouble. Texas law is very clear that you are not allowed to record or listen in on a conversation that you are not a party to. In Texas, if you are not a party to the conversation, you don’t have a right to eavesdrop on it.”

That privacy law is part of the reason many of the covert cameras private investigators use don’t record sound.

The cameras can be disguised as cell phones, jump drives, even key chains, and it makes it pretty easy to capture evidence.

Kimmons’ library includes footage of married men on dates at an expensive restaurants and a cheating wife getting cozy with her physical trainer over drinks.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said. “(As) part of the job, I’ve run into people I know. I’ve run into famous people. I’ve run into attorneys that I do work for on other cases, a judge or two over the years, a reporter.”

Kimmons says 80 to 90 percent of his investigations end with the suspecting spouses worst fears confirmed. Their husband or wife is cheating, but the confirmation is expensive.

Private investigators charge an average of $85 per hour, plus mileage and other expenses, and most won’t take a case for less than $3,000.

“If they’re on a limited budget I’ll say, ‘look, the best thing to do is leave town. Let him know way ahead of time, or her. Leave town for four or five days where he knows you’re not going to be around at all, or she knows, and if they’re up to something they’re going to take advantage of that opportunity and let us work it’,” Kimmons said.

The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday about police use of GPS tracking without a warrant, appearing deeply disturbed by unlimited use of the technology but uneasy about whether and how to regulate it.
The justices likened their concerns to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” in oral arguments in the case of Antoine Jones, a District nightclub owner was arrested in 2005 on cocaine-distribution charges after police placed a GPS device on his vehicle without a valid warrant and tracked the car for a month.

“If you win this case then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States,” Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, who argued the case for the Justice Department. Breyer added such tracking would “suddenly produce what sounds like ‘1984.’”

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A case with 2 questions
The Supreme Court is considering two questions in the Jones case:
1. Did the installation of a GPS device on his car without a warrant violate his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures?
2. Did the warrantless use of that device to track his movements for a month violate his Fourth Amendment rights?
Dreeben asserted that using GPS to track vehicles was akin to visual surveillance. The Supreme Court held in a 1983 case that people have no expectation of privacy on public roads. But that case involved a beeper device that helped police maintain a visual on the vehicle during a single trip.

“That seems to me dramatically different,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

The court is not known for its grasp of new technologies, but the justices seemed perturbed by the scenarios they envisioned if warrantless monitoring were allowed.

“With computers, it’s now so simple to amass an enormous amount of information about people,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

Roberts appeared alarmed when Dreeben said placing a GPS on all of the justices’ cars and tracking them for a month posed no constitutional violation.

The justices peppered Dreeben with questions about the implications of long-term, warrantless surveillance, but also pressed Jones attorney Stephen Leckar about how limits could be defined.

Justice Elena Kagan noted that surveillance cameras are pervasive in cities like London.

Examiner Archives
Supreme Court to hear GPS surveillance case (11-6-11)
Report urges limits on police use of GPS tracking (9-21-11)
Supreme Court to hear D.C. case on police GPS tracking (6-27-11)
“How is this different?” she asked.

Leckar suggested that a short trip might be permissible to track without a warrant, but could not clearly articulate what a workable rule for law enforcement might be. He maintained that police violated Jones’ Fourth Amendment rights simply by placing the device on his vehicle.

Justice Anthony Kennedy told Dreeben he had “serious reservations” about how the GPS was installed.

The justices could rule solely on the installation issue and leave the questions about prolonged tracking for another case.

The case went to the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled last year that the warrantless monitoring violated Jones’ reasonable expectations of privacy. Other circuit courts have upheld similar GPS tracking.

A ruling is expected by June.

For a month in 2005, police in Washington tracked Antoine Jones’s every move — or at least those he made in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Using a GPS device authorities had secretly attached to the vehicle, investigators in the nation’s capital were able to tie him to a suspected drug stash house. Jones was eventually arrested and convicted in federal court of conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

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The case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, raising far- reaching questions about privacy in an age when technology gives police unprecedented power to peer into Americans’ day-to-day activities with cameras, computers and tracking devices. In arguments tomorrow, the justices will consider whether police need a search warrant before using a global-positioning system device to monitor a suspect for weeks at a time.

“It’s very important because the police have begun to use technology in all sorts of investigations for all sorts of purposes,” said Chris Slobogin, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, who has written a book on the legal implications of the high-tech government surveillance methods.

The case is before the court as lawmakers and privacy advocates are raising concerns that companies are collecting personal data from electronic devices, including mobile phones and tablet computers, for marketing purposes.

Apple Data
In recent months, Apple Inc. (AAPL) has denied allegations that it tracks the location of iPhone and iPad users, General Motors Co. (GM)’s OnStar vehicle-navigation service has promised not to collect data on the driving habits of former customers and Facebook Inc. has faced accusations that it tracks users’ Internet browsing after they log out of the social-networking site.

The high court case doesn’t directly affect those private- sector controversies and instead focuses on the limits placed on the government by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Supreme Court in 1983 upheld the use of a beeper placed on a car to track a suspect during a single trip. The newest question is whether police need a warrant to use GPS devices continuously over longer periods. Lower courts are divided on the issue, with the federal appeals court in Jones’s case overturning his conviction.

Privacy advocates say a ruling in favor of the police would open a dangerous new chapter in government surveillance of ordinary citizens. Unlike with the beeper, which required an officer to follow the suspect’s car to pick up the signals being emitted, GPS devices allow monitoring with very little police effort, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.

‘More Effective’
“With GPS tracking, you can have a computer monitor with 100 cars under surveillance being viewed by a single officer with a cup of coffee,” said Rotenberg, whose group is siding with Jones in the case. “That can’t be permissible.”

The efficiency of GPS tracking is also an argument in its favor, said Anthony Barkow, executive director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University School of Law. His office filed a brief urging the court to rule that officers didn’t need a warrant in the Jones case.

GPS tracking “is both less costly and more effective” than other investigation methods, said Barkow, a former federal prosecutor. The case “has tremendous implications in a world of limited budgets and budget crises.”

Easier Tracking
Tracking may become even easier as more vehicles come pre- equipped with GPS technology. In the Jones case, officers not only had to attach the device to the vehicle, they had to return to replace the battery.

Jones, now 51, was a Maryland resident who owned a nightclub in Washington where prosecutors say he ran a narcotics trafficking organization. The GPS device, placed in the car while it was in a Maryland parking lot, was one facet of an investigation by local and federal authorities that also included visual surveillance and a wiretap on Jones’s mobile phone. Jones is serving a life sentence.

The Obama administration is urging the high court not to require a warrant for GPS use, calling it a “minimally intrusive” step that yields important results in drug and terrorism cases. To obtain a warrant, officers must show a judge that they have “probable cause” to believe the search will lead to evidence of a crime.

“GPS surveillance is a critically important law enforcement tool that often may be most important in the inception of an investigation when probable cause is lacking,” argued U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, the administration’s top Supreme Court advocate.

Traditional Investigation
The government also argues that GPS tracking provides no more information than what police could have obtained through more traditional means.

“If they had unlimited resources, they would have been able to accomplish the same thing,” Barkow said. “It shouldn’t be unconstitutional just because they’re doing it with a device.”

In a 1967 case, the Supreme Court said the Fourth Amendment doesn’t shield information that a person “knowingly exposes to the public.”

Jones’s lawyers say GPS devices can show a pattern of movement that officers might not detect through visual observation. In throwing out the conviction, a federal appeals court in Washington agreed with that reasoning.

“The whole of one’s movements over the course of a month” indicates “far more than the individual movements it comprises,” the panel ruled. “The difference is not one of degree but of kind, for no single journey reveals the habits and patterns that mark the distinction between a day in the life and a way of life.”

The case is United States v. Jones, 10-1259.