In a frightening new decision, a federal appeals court says that you have no expectation of privacy when the police want to track your location using your cell phone. U.S. v. Skinner, Case No. 09-6497.The court said that the police don’t need to bother getting a warrant if they want to track you by using the GPS signal in your cell phone to track you. This means that sheriffs can freely track Latinos who could be undocumented, the police can see which political meetings you attend, and the cops can learn whether you go to a church or a synagogue.In a ruling that is right out of the pages of George Orwell’s “1984,†the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, blithely ruled on August 14, 2012, that police efficiency and convenience overrides your right to be free of electronic spying.The case in question involved a marijuana bust, but the ruling applies to the 85 percent of adults who own a cell phone, a dashboard navigation device and many iPads.Cell phones continue sending a signal several times a minute even when they are turned off. The only way to stop the GPS signal from a cell phone is to take out the battery, which is nearly impossible for the 75 million consumers who own an iPhone. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this year that the police must get a warrant when they physically attach a GPS device. But the Sixth Circuit ruled that but if you happen to be carrying one already, that’s cool — the government can track you.In the view of the Sixth Circuit, it is just too much of a hassle for the police to get a warrant to catalog your every movement with your phone’s GPS signal. “Using a more efficient means of discovering this information does not amount to a Fourth Amendment violation,†the court sniffed. The government can track you from the skyIncredibly, the court equated high-tech electronic monitoring with a bloodhound following a scent or identifying a car by its color. The judges said that GPS tracking of citizens is the same as someone following you on the street.The Sixth Circuit judges must have gone to law school in a totalitarian country, because they clearly have no concept of most Americans’ expectation of privacy.Think about it: The government now can track you from the sky without a warrant (as well as track all the attendees with cell phones at a political meeting) or because you attended an Occupy Wall Street protest or because they think you had too many glasses of merlot. If the police get a tip that you’re wearing clothes commonly used in a crime, they can literally watch your every step.“The government should have to get a warrant before tracking cell phones. That is what is necessary to protect Americans’ privacy, and it is also what is required under the Constitution,†said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.In a dissent, Sixth Circuit Judge Bernice B. Donald said, “…the question is simply whether society is prepared to recognize a legitimate expectation of privacy in the GPS data emitted from any cell phone. Because I would answer this question in the affirmative, I cannot join…the majority opinion.If you suspect that the police are tracking your movements using your cell phone GPS, I strongly recommend you find a criminal defense attorney on Lawyers.com.The bottom line is that if you don’t want the police to know which doors you knocked on as a precinct committeeman, or whether you went to church or went to a bar, or whether you went to the gym or your girlfriend — leave your cell phone somewhere else. Big Brother is definitely watching you.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.†It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness†program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.But “this is more than just a data center,†says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.â€
by your cell phone. Seems like I vaguely remember hearing about this but don't remember posting it....
I know that I should probably care, but I really don't. My life is pretty boring. Have fun tracking me and listening to my calls.
Bottom feeder says this thread gives him wood a woody.
7 Replies
1695 Views