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New Limits to FBI Tracking of Cell Phone Users
EvilTwinSkippy writes "According to the Washington Post (free registration),
Two Federal Courts have seperately ruled that the FBI may not track the location of cell phone users without proof that a crime has been committed, or is in progress. The cases involve the FBI seeking court orders to track suspects in real-time using the mobile phone network as part of an ongoing investigation."
Isn't any tourist ("foreign body") in the US by definition a suspect terrorist under the new definition?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
But I thought that in the eyes of the Federal Government we were all guilty of a crime anyway?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
In the last year or so, cell phone tracking of criminals has lost its value more and more.
As more cell phone evidence has been submitted in court, the more loopholes have opened up.
One of my importer/exporter customers already pulls his battery when hitting the road. Before dumping the battery back in, he picks a random sim card. I set every sim card to ring the same voice mail on "Missed Calls" so he can easily find out what he missed.
No black market businessman is stupid anymore. Hell, there are entire newsletters now offering advice on how to avoid mistakes that might get you in trouble.
To get a search warrant or a wire tap they have to meet the same test. On the other hand, they are allowed to follow you around at will. I wonder when they will get a law saying that all the video cameras in the city have to be connected to their central server. Then they'll be able to 'follow' you around without leaving the comfort of their desks.
As the article states, this is in response to the rising civil liberties violations thanks to the U SAP AT RIOT Act.
Ultimately, as long as you are on US soil, you have the right to due process no matter who you blew up. Of course, get caught by us anywhere else and you could find yourself in Guantanamo. I believe that is what you are talking about, concerning "terrorists."
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
One of my importer/exporter customers already pulls his battery when hitting the road. Before dumping the battery back in, he picks a random sim card. I set every sim card to ring the same voice mail on "Missed Calls" so he can easily find out what he missed.
I have to ask: what's this guy hiding from? And doesn't going to this kind of trouble pretty much scream, "I'M UP TO SOMETHING!"?
When the FBI went to do wiretaps on regular phones, they ended up having to have a court order and evidence of a crime being committed or in progress. This is much the same thing, however there is a much bigger effort involved. To get the cellular company to track your phone:
1 - It won't be accurate as GPS
2 - It won't be easy, and will take much effort
3 - Cellular is much easier than Voice over WiFi, but still takes a lot of work
4 - Tracking the location of a cellular phone is nearly stupid, especially if its a 'go' phone that you can simply throw away
5 - Knowing where a phone is, doesn't tell the cops anything unless they can also prove you were with it
The technical issues around this are just too many to make it of any real use. Real bad guys (not the stupid ones) already know how to get around this. If you are not a bad guy, you are not worth the effort to get a court order for, and believe me, cellular companies are not going to go through the motions without a warrant (I have some experience here) because it costs money. Tracking joe bloggs' cell phone just for kicks is not going to happen.
The more interesting things that can be done is to use the cellphone service to locate possible victims in collapsed buildings etc. in a disaster. Say, New Orleans 9th ward, if there is a working cellphone found, there is probably someone with it. Tracking cellphone positions (without personally identifying information) can lead to better service if you know where they are all at (usually) during different periods of the day. There are social welfare implications to this type of knowledge, and they are good things too. The trouble is that it will take something like an IBM supercomputer to collect and use the information in a useful way.
Until the police / authorities run the cellular networks, there is not a lot to worry about on this particular issue.
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I think they need evidence that a crime has been committed or is in the process of being committed, and that the person they want to track is involved in that crime. That last part especially is one they seem to want to skip.
I know a guy who is a law-abiding, honorable U.S. citizen. This guy doesn't have so much as a traffic ticket on his record. He's engaged in some biological research that's pretty heavy along the lines of what coders would refer to as "run-time DNA modification," etc. Along with this is a bunch of HIPAA protected patient data, and all sorts of other stuff that I'm sure I don't know about. He has a bit of a paranoid streak, which was made worse after the world went to shit after 9/11.
As part of being a responsible guy, he encrypts everything. Most of us do this anyway. The passphrase decrypts a file on a USB key that he keeps on him. That file then has a number of keys on it, some of which have backups elsewhere, and some of which don't. He plugs the USB key in, types however many passphrases he needs to, decrypts the key, and then that key is used to decrypt the actual data. The idea is that he can torch the USB drive and data that he wants to be forever gone is toast. Like I said, some of the keys are backed up, but some aren't. He told us about this so that if someting happens to him, we know where to get the keys, and don't waste our time trying to find keys to the few voluems for which they no longer exist.
So here we have a situation where a guy can be scared by the surveillence of the government because they inaccurately suspect him of doing something else. He torches the key. They catch him and want the data. He can show them backup keys to some of it, but not all of it. The government then gets him for obstruction of justice, and holds him for data that he physically can't produce.
By the way, this kind of security mechanism isn't unusual in my experience among people in the biological sciences communitty, because many of them are very, very concerned about how their data could be used. I do the same kind of thing, though not quite this paranoid. I guess the government would prefer that they get bagged in a bar one night and Al Qaeda get the background research they've been doing on the next bird flu or even more virulent Ebola strain.
Viva la freedom. Go U.S.!
The sad thing is, this won't stop the FBI from doing it. They'll just request the information without a court order. Most people don't know their rights, and if an FBI agent comes up to them and tells them to provide information, they'll probably comply.