Your Cellphone Lets the Government Track You
Following up on my post about FBI cell phone tapping, the FBI and U.S. DoJ have started tracking citizens without probable cause. Compounding this breach of our Civil Rights, two court decisions have split on the decision of whether this is legal. On January 17, one federal judge in Wisconsin rightfully ruled it was unlawful. Then just 9 days later, a Louisiana judge ruled the opposite.
This just opens the door for prosecutors to abuse the law in the future, which is especially disturbing since the FBI swore never to use the 1994 ommunications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to track cellular phones, but has been doing it anyway.
When lobbying for that law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh assured the U.S. Senate that location surveillance would never take place unless there was evidence of wrongdoing.“It does not include any information which might disclose the general location of a mobile facility or service, beyond that associated with the area code or exchange of the facility or service,” Freeh testified. “There is no intent whatsoever, with reference to this term, to acquire anything that could properly be called ‘tracking’ information.”The problem is that the Justice Department’s current official position–a flip-flop from its previous official position–says police should be able to secretly monitor your whereabouts as long as they claim that tracking could possibly be “relevant” to some investigation. Not only is that insufficiently privacy-protective, it doesn’t track what the law actually says.
Our Government continues to step on our Civil Rights whenever it suits them, and this has got to stop.
