Posted on 12/14/2017 6:25:26 AM PST by Kaslin
For many of us, the information we carry around on a smart phone is the Rosetta Stone to decipher our lives. Our appointments, personal and business contacts, notes, favorite tunes, photographs, and many more windows into the inner recesses of our lives and livelihoods can be found there.
Besides the incredibly personal and valuable information inside our smart phones, our cell phone service providers have plenty of our valuable information, such as with whom we have spoken and even a record of our locations. And under present law, police and prosecutors don’t need a warrant issued after probable cause to obtain it from those companies and look at it.
The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in Carpenter v. U.S. about whether the Fourth Amendment protects cell phone data held by the phone companies. The case has potentially major implications for privacy in the digital age.
Over at the Law & Liberty blog, esteemed originalist Professor Mike Rappaport addresses the key Fourth Amendment issue of the day in his piece “The Original Meaning and the Carpenter Case: Congress’s Protection of Customer Information.” He writes:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
They exist. A simple foil bag is enough. Fancy pouches are available.
I have neither. Anyone who knows me knows to just leave a message on my answering machine at my home on my LAND LINE.
For a variety of reasons, I will not participate in the tracking of American citizens. Seems the Feds can find millions of us who were born here & are NO threat to he country, but they CANNOT find the millions of illegals who are here.
They interviewed a groom from the horse area near Fallbrook, Calif, who was displaced by he fires there & he could NOT speak ONE WORD of English. Acted like he was a long time employee of the horse facility, but couldn’t speak ONE WORD of English. Translator needed for the interview.
Heck they count your nose hairs every time you hold the phone in front of your face while using it.
Next time they check and you’ve not trimmed then they will invoke the PixelLazer on the main screen and trim them for you;)
The cash only lines have long lines waiting to pay the toll.
On a trip home from another area, a cash only relative heading here also, took 10 minutes to get to through the toll booth. We zipped through the fast pass at a good clip and beat the cash guy still in a line after paying our toll.
We got to our home about 12 minutes faster than the cash only relative. His wife told him to buy a Fast Pass or else. He did!
Upshot: assume you ARE being tracked, and all your information accessible, but nobody cares because your life is boring.
...unless you make your life interesting for some reason, at which point you should carefully consider exactly what you’re doing, how you could be tracked/reported, how that monitoring can be evaded, and why you’re doing whatever may attract that kind of attention.
I finally consented to a “fast pass” when (A) I rarely have enough cash for tolls I’m not expecting, and (B) mapping programs often route you thru no-cash toll booths. With EZPass and SunPass tucked behind my mirror, and auto-pay set up for both, I don’t have to care about toll booths at all now. Yes they could abuse the data (say, send me a fine for driving too fast from one toll to the next), but so far they don’t and the convenience way outweighs the paranoia.
The other is that the government apparently thinks it has a 'right' to view any 3rd party information at any time, for any reason whatsoever. The court largely has backed them in this, because the concept is so incredibly useful for the furtherance of the powers of the police state.
One other thing that I'd like to point out is that cellphone carriers could save themselves a lot of trouble by not keeping the data generated by cellphone 'pings'. There is no reason to hang onto it for more than an hour or so in most cases. They have to keep call completion records for billing purposes, but this other data is not useful for that.
If we actually were living in a free country, you'd be seeing ads by various cellphone companies talking about how they value your privacy, so you, as a consumer, should be using them, rather than the other guys.
Of course, you'd see a law passed within days of such advertising being aired that requires them to hang on to the information, which the government would then claim to be able to access because it was '3rd party' data, even though the data was essentially created by legislative fiat.
For those interested in reading the oral arguments, I took the PDF of the transcript from the court and converted it to HTML as that tends to be easier to read for most folk.
YOu can use one of those foil potato chip bags. Apparently they work pretty well. Easy to test too. Put in the bag, then try to call the number.
I used to have a similar experience as you describe, with long lines for cash and none for ez pass.
Now it seems the cash lines have died down, at least here in the northeast.
Guess it’s only a matter of time before they’re gone altogether. Last time I was in Denver there were no booths or passes at all, just cameras tracking license plates.
I never use my phone for anything I wouildn’t want out there - when I have sensitive data, I go to the gym and use Anderson Cooper’s phone....
I really only have to worry about all that when they start going after Christians. Won’t be long.
I have a smartphone, but it contains next to nothing of those sorts of things. I've just never felt safe storing all my personal data on a phone.
pretty much
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.