John Halpin, a man who for the past 21 years has been the supervisor of a gang of carpenters in the New York City schools system, looks likely to lose his job after municipal apparatchiks tracked his movements via a city-issued mobile phone enabled with a GPS application and found that he had often been leaving work early.
In what is being seen as a very important and precedent-setting case, an administrative trial judge, Tynia Richard, has recommended that Mr. Halpin be dismissed from his post for leaving his work early and without permission on 83 specimen occasions between March 2 and Aug. 9, 2006.
John Halpin's hours of work are 08h00 to 15h30 – not exactly onerous – and city officials brought forward evidence to show that he was often logged by his GPS phone as being at his home co-ordinates at times varying between 13h40 and 14h40.
The case is causing a furore because the data allegedly showing that he was not at work when he should have been was taken from his mobile phone. Mr. Halpin accepted the offer of a municipally-provided free handset in 2005 but many of his co-workers, suspicious of a rare gratis gift from a notoriously parsimonious and controlling authority, declined the offer.
The case has prompted a renewed debate on privacy rights of US citizens and the emergence of what some believe to be an out-of-control surveillance society in the years following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Civil liberties organisations and lawyers are making much of the fact that when Mr.
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