iFixit pried open an FBI car tracker and published its secrets

FBI car-tracking devices were surfacing in public: Wired had reported on Yasir Afifi finding one under his car, and profiled Kathy Thomas, who found the tracker this teardown examined under her own car. News stories could describe the trackers from the outside, but the hardware itself stayed a black box - until iFixit, the repair-documentation company, partnered with Wired to open one on its teardown bench.

iFixit's teardown was not an essay about surveillance: it was the company's standard repair-guide process applied to a covert device. The team drilled out screw heads buried under so much threadlocker that a power drill was required, split the GPS antenna from the transmitter/receiver module, and photographed every board. Along the way they identified the parts: a u-blox GPS-MS1 receiver from June 1999, an XEMICS XE1201 low-power transceiver, an RFM RF1172 SAW filter for 433.92 MHz reception, and four lithium-thionyl chloride D-cells, each rated 13,000 mAh with a 10-20 year service life.

The details did the reporting. The GPS module's slightly misaligned, hand-soldered components suggested the FBI had hand-built and tailored the boards rather than buying them off the shelf; magnets and Velcro showed the mounting was fast and non-permanent; the threadlocker showed someone did not want the unit opened. Off-the-shelf chips and a 1999-era receiver also punctured any image of exotic spy gear: this was a mundane device whose power source was engineered for years of silent operation.

Published May 9, 2011, the teardown drew an audience the news coverage had not: 325 points and 79 comments on Hacker News the same day, and the guide has since accumulated more than 855,000 views on iFixit. It turned "you are being tracked" from a claim into a parts list anyone could check.

Publish the device itself: take it apart and show the parts

Photographs and part numbers are undeniable: no FBI statement could rebut a published photo of a hand-soldered board or a dated chip, so the teardown stood on its own evidence.

iFixit already owned the craft: step-by-step disassembly guides were its core product, so the marginal cost of documenting a covert tracker was near zero once a unit was on the bench.

Concrete specs made surveillance legible: a 10-20 year battery life and a 433.92 MHz transmitter told readers how the devices are built and how long they can watch, replacing fear with facts.

The Wired partnership supplied reach and context, while the teardown format gave the story durable, reference-grade value that kept drawing viewers long after the news cycle.

When a dispute turns on a secret physical object, dismantle it in public: part numbers and photographs are evidence no spokesperson can rebut, and the teardown becomes the record

The guide's all-time view count on iFixit has passed 855,000, and the same-day Hacker News thread scored 325 points with 79 comments. The page still lives as a featured guide, repairability joke intact, and the episode showed that iFixit's documentation craft could operate as investigative journalism: show the device itself, and the evidence speaks for everyone to check.