The OOIDA has filed a lawsuit with the 7th Circuit court of appeals, against the near future requirement for e-logging, stating that it is defacto monitoring real people for law enforcement purposes, and called e-logs a form of tracking that, without a warrant, constitutes illegal search and seizure and a violation of drivers’ fourth amendment rights.

the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, announced late last year that all truck drivers will be required to use the electronic logging devices, known as e-logs, by the end of next year.

The FMCSA has said e-logs would help enforce limits on the hours that drivers can spend on the road.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, OOIDA, has previously won a challenge to a prior e-log rule in 2011, on complaints that the regulation did not provide adequate safeguards to ensure trucking companies wouldn’t use the logs to harass drivers.

“There is simply no proof that the costs, burdens and privacy infringements associated with this mandate are justified,” said Jim Johnston, OOIDA president and CEO, in the statement.

FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne declined to comment about the lawsuit.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/independent-truckers-tell-court-e-logs-violate-constitutional-rights-1459444146?mod=e2fb


Overdrive has shown that a sizable majority of the estimated benefit that FMCSA noted in its required Regulatory Impact Analysis (which showed a net benefit of the rule) came not from estimated crash reductions, however, but from monetary values placed on driver time and paperwork savings.

For the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court has previously ruled in favor of some intrusions into the business of commercial transportation operators in, famously, the case involving a drug-testing program decided in 1989 that argued a public “special need” in balancing concerns for safety versus the privacy rights of rail engineers. Programmatic drug- and alcohol-testing requirements followed for commercial truck operators in the 1990s.

But drug tests are not ELDs, and OOIDA argues that other Supreme Court decisions, incluing the 2015 Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, affirm that prolonged use of a warrantless GPS tracking device on a vehicle is clearly an unreasonable search/seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

 OOIDA said that FMCSA’s attempt to compel installation of ELD devices without a warrant is an unconstitutional seizure.

http://www.overdriveonline.com/ooida-fmcsas-eld-mandate-abitrary-and-capricious-unconstitutional/