By Allan Lengel

It’s fair to surmise that the FBI has a surplus of GPS devices that are just going to be sitting around.

The Wall Street Journal reports that FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann said at a conference Friday that a Supreme Court ruling requiring a court order before placing a GPS on someone’s car has prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS devices that were in use.

Weissmann made his comments at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century.”

The Journal reports that the devices were often placed underneath cars to track movements.