Posted on 02/11/2010 11:08:16 AM PST by Free ThinkerNY
The Justice Department is poised this week to publicly defend a little-known law-enforcement practice that critics say may be the "sleeper" privacy issue of the 21st century: the collection of cell-phone "tracking" records that identify the physical locations where the phones have been.
It may come as a surprise to most of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones, but their cell-phone company retains records of where their device has been at all timeseither because the phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint the phones' location to within areas as small as a few hundred feet.
Such location "logs" never show up on your monthly cell-phone bill. But federal court records filed over the past year indicate that federal prosecutors and the FBI have increasingly been obtaining such records in the course of criminal investigationswithout any notice to the cell-phone customer or any showing of "probable cause" that tracking the physical location of the phone will turn up evidence of an actual crime.
"Most people don't understand they are carrying a tracking device in their pockets," says Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group that has been trying to monitor the Justice Department's practice.
Much about the practiceincluding how many "tracking" records have been collected by the governmentremains shrouded in secrecy. But in one court case in which the use of such records arose, a Philadelphia FBI agent named William Shute testified that he had obtained such records 150 times in recent years in order to track the location of federal fugitives.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.newsweek.com ...
I don’t care, unless it has something to do with that annoying helicopter that keeps hovering over my house. Otherwise, the FBI, phone company, CIA, NAACP can monitor away. I can see why others might be concerned.
Nobody cares until they have a criminal case to prove and happen to have information that you were in the area.
They whole idea that you will give up your liberty when our govt is being pushed into communism is sad.
I want to get into some of the technical aspects of this issue.
There are two services that a smart phone has that are part of the phone's OS and are accessible to the user on a Blackberry.
There is the GPS chip that actually does the work, and there is a service that turns the chip on or off, or controls when and where the chip is needed. You can turn off the GPS, but without disabling the program service, different apps can turn it on for you. If you disable both the chip and the service, the chip will not turn on with one exception and this is the 911 call. The government demanded that this system work and it cannot be turned off however it only works if 911 is called. That action bypasses any settings and the service turns the chip on so that the 911 operator can locate the phone.
The only other way to locate you and it would not be very accurate, would be to know about where you are so the cell tower could be located. The phone could be pinged and the reply ping could be triangulated. This is done often enough, but you must know the general vicinity first.
As to the GPS, that baby ain't turning on unless I tell it too. I have both the GPS and the service that controls it turned off. The only way it turns on is to physically dial 911.
btt
Or to have a call made to your phone that would initiate the 911 calling procedure.
the govt goes to the effort to force cell phone manufacturers to install GPS and then allows them to put an off switch in? got any bridges for sale?
OnStar can access unless the battery is disconnected or you had the unit removed.
Someone thinks this is news? Even if your phone doesn’t have GPS, your phone can be tracked, although with a lower level of accuracy.
I’m not saying the NSA can do that or not, or that all it would require is a call to your phone and some code sent.
Cell phones are the worst nightmare for those concerned about their privacy. They are essentially bugs carried around by individuals often 24/7. Most come with a video feed as well. It is only software that prevents anyone from listening into your private conversations even when not using the phone.
If you’re really worried about having your whereabouts tracked, keep it turned off except to use it.
Sure they got us. Phone records, credit/debit cards, internet pecker tracks, etc. etc. And this info is being ‘grinded’ nonstop by FBI, NSA software scanning for patterns: ‘hot’ words, clusters, proximity, drug spots, weapons, political statements...
And certain entities bubble to the top and get extra cycles allocated to them. Get on the sh%t list.
It’s all over, my friends. We are all guilty. It is just a matter of semantics.
However, Are they gonna lock all 20 million of us up?
I suppose that code could be put into a worm via e-mail, concealed in a hidden application or such, but I totally wipe (reformat) the memory on mine at least twice a year and then rebuild the apps. I do much the same on my computers after making sure all my data is clean and saved.
Just for your info, I am cautious because I have been computer hacked before and they got my personal e-mails and bank info from my desktop. They did it on a private wireless network through a game port that had been opened to the Internet to aid the game. I have firewalls, but if a port is open, it's open.
I learned my lesson. I am locked up tight.
Self, it is not necessary to lock up 20 million. 100 thousand would be enough to terrify the rest into submission!
Kaplan’s opinion said that the eavesdropping technique “functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.” Some handsets can’t be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance,
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html
Yes.
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