I'd love to come for a drink. Where is the nearest defibrillator? - Mike Magee
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US government can demand your cellphone data
AN APPEALS COURT in the land of the free has decided that people will be even freer if the government is allowed to take mobile cell site data that mobile phone carriers retain on their customers without being troubled by the legal system.
A US federal appeals court said that government agencies do not need a warrant showing probable cause under the Fourth Amendment to demand the mobile phone location records from carriers.
Lower courts had ruled that the government needed to show probable cause before it could require such data from the telecom network operators.
According to Wired it is not quite cut and dried, however. The government still needs to go to a US District Court for permission to collect the data, it just does not need to say why. It is left to the whims of District Court judges to decide if they think it is a good idea or not.
The appeals court said the law gave judges "the option" to require a warrant showing probable cause before approving the data requisitions.
Phone companies keep such records for 18 months and they show which mobile phone tower the customer was connected to at the beginning and end of each call.
The Department of Justice argued that all a judge needed to force a carrier to produce the data was a statement from the coppers that they wanted it.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the decision highlights that the law needs to be clarified. µ
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If They assume you are where your mobe is while you're making a call, then it becomes a rather simple tech-geek game to spoof The System to have Them think you're in a different location than where you actually are.
Back-to-back handsets being a far too-obvious-to-work ploy.
I mention this with the intent that Plod will be very careful in making assumptions.
The government requires it...
The real brain-twisting question is -- what is the excuse for phone companies to keep that data for so long?
I have difficulty working up outrage over anything wireless: if you *pay* to put a spy gadget in your pocket, and broadcast to the world, then you can hardly complain that the gov't makes obvious use of it. -- But in the abstract, I'm not *for* any increase of gov't snooping.
In my day, we used safe secure *wires* that gov't had to physically connect to, before they put in all them dang computerized switches. No good ever comes of digital computers, I tells ya.
Even the thickest reactionary teabagger would figure out to leave his phone at home when bombing the "progress through metric system" headquarters.
This is doubleplus ungood, indeed!
and what if someone else was using my phone?
So much for the doctrine of laissez faire.