Law enforcement tracking Americans' cell phones

[sharingwisdom]

Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time
February 19, 2010, Newsweek magazine
https://www.newsweek.com/id/233916
Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time—without the benefit of a warrant. Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?'" Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

Note: For many key reports from major media sources on the disturbing trend toward increasing government and corporate surveillance, click here.

[2Bwacco]

Through TV programs such as Law & Order we learn that law enforcement can turn on/off your phone remotely. I'm guessing this technology can also be applied to laptop computers with internet capability.

Your phone can also be cloned -- so someone could be using your phone number posing as you, being tracked as if they were YOU.

Sophisticated electronic surveillance can most likely detect a cell phone ping (electronic tether to nearest cell phone tower) and automatically grab the phone number from the air.

...cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket...

["Mad" Miles]

One of the many reasons I do not have a "cell" (as I call them.)

And for any member of law enforcement reading this, I have nothing to hide! I'm not up to anything!! Honest Officer, nothing to see here, please move along...

I just like the idea of privacy as a right and I'm clinging to the last fraying threads of it in our society.

Back in 2005, when discussing this issue with my Sophomore Honors World History students, they pretty much had the position that the government should be allowed to pry into every possible detail of their, our, lives. Their argument was, if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care? And if you care, you must be up to something. So, the cops should be able to surveil, very closely, anyone they like.

I was appalled but since my job is to teach them how to think, not what to think, I couldn't really linger on the topic. I did tell them that I disagreed with their position and briefly, why. But I had to move one. I just hoped as they matured that they might begin to see the advantages of a personal zone of privacy in their lives. I'm not holding my breath.

Ooops, if my goal was to avoid special attention from the forces of order, I probably blew that one!

"Mad" Miles