Justice Department wants phone locals without a warrent

I thought I might draw some attention to this article because I believe this issue will become a growing threat to the general publics privacy.

From February 12th, Associated Press.

Should the government be allowed to track a person's movements based on cell phone records, without evidence of criminal wrongdoing?

A showdown on the issue unfolded Friday in a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, as the Justice Department battled electronic-privacy groups.

The privacy groups say the information could reveal when someone goes to a religious service, medical clinic or political rally, or is having an extramarital affair. Third U.S. Circuit Judge Dolores Sloviter seemed to share that concern.

"You know there are governments in the world that would like to know where some of their people are or have been," Sloviter challenged Justice Department lawyer Mark Eckenwiler, an associate director of criminal enforcement operations.

"Can the government assure us that it will never try to find out these things?" she asked. "Don't we have to be concerned about this? Not this government right now, but a government?"

Law enforcement agencies hope to obtain cell phone location data from cellular providers without first showing probable cause of a crime - and without the customer's knowledge. The data comes from cell phone towers, and in densely populated cities can pinpoint a person's location to within a few hundred yards.

The issue is not whether the government can obtain the information, but whether a probable-cause warrant should be required first.

"An individual has no Fourth Amendment-protected privacy interest in business records, such as cell-site usage information, that are kept, maintained and used by a cell phone company," Eckenwiler wrote in his brief.

Sloviter countered by asking Eckenwiler why there was a need to skip a probable-cause showing, saying that she knew no magistrates reluctant to grant search warrant applications.

He replied that the relevant law does not require them. Eckenwiler said probable-cause warrants are only needed to obtain the contents of electronic communications, such as a text or e-mail, or to wiretap a phone. He believes the 1986 Electronics Communications Privacy Act allows police to obtain "non-content" data without a warrant.

The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act seems like an obviously outdated piece of legislation. According to this [url=http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_mob_pho_sub-media-mobile-phone-subscribers/

What I get out of this article is that the government would basically have a population with the equivalent of ankle bracelets. You know the kind they put on criminals on house arrest.

It's not just mobile phones, most U.K garages, have CCTV that reads your license plates. So if that stuff starts getting more wide spread across the nations road networks, and when they start adding-improving face recognition technology; it's not hard to imagine a society where everyone is watched, everyone is recorded BUT at little cost as it'll be done by cheap computers that report to people, or maybe even (one day) each other.
The invention of the steam engine was great for Europe wide democracy because it meant that in order for a nation to keep up to date in the crafts of war, it also had to people educated enough to both set up, and run the factories. Educated people meant people who could, read, write, and buy themselves influence, and so it was only a matter of time until the feudal system (that had existed for thousands of years) had to come to a democratic end.
But computer technology will have the opposite effect that the steam engine had. It makes oppression cheap, and therefore practical, and it's encouraged the creation of the EU which (to my mind) aims to make the nations of Europe equally undemocratic-competitive. You can now run empires with a fraction of the inefficiency-cost as was even recently the case.
Right now technology has proven good for freedom, as there was a time when not everyone could be tracked on Google, not everyone's IP address, could be detected, and there were good ways to hide an IP address. But one should never forget the governments ability to command resources is far great than any individuals.