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Legal Battles Over Cellphone Tracking
stupefaction writes "The New York Times reports on recent successful court challenges to police use of cellphone tracking information in the course of an investigation. From the article: 'In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants. [...] Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on.'"
http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/cell_phones/
As a general rule, I always turn off the location settings on my phone. Sprint has had this feature enabled by default for the past 3 years, and it wasn't until recently that I learned I was broadcasting my whereabouts 24x7.
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People should stop focusing on the _last_ things keeping them from becoming a police state, and start focusing on the _first_ things.
Starting with very dubious electronic voting machines and who you vote as leaders.
Once you get too many of the wrong people in power, they can change all that stuff very quickly. Look at the Patriot Act, and all the recent crappy laws with dangerous long term consequences.
If citizens keep sticking their heads in the sand (or erm troughs of junk food?), the leaders can basically do what they want with impunity.
Even if you don't allow tracking now, Mr Evil Dictator can always turn it back on, once he's in power.
So the main thing is to never allow Mr Evil Dictator a chance to get power in the first place.
It is quite scary and sad that history has proven that many people will actually be willing to listen to some evil person and give him the power. These people will willingly kill anybody - even their relatives or parents/children just because "it's their job" or the supreme leader told them to.
Case law provides numerous specific allowance criteria for probable cause:
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http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/315/315lect06.ht
Actually, this is wrong. At one time, I had to talk with upper 911 officials about GPS software. They can only get less than 300 yards if they are in a BIG city, hence more towers to use for triangulation. This fails as you move to say, a rural area (aka driving in the country) or even driving on a major highway going from city to city. In most cases they can't even do triangulation, worst case they can get 1-2 strips of area that could be up to 10 miles in area, less worse, they only get 2 points which are up to 10 miles apart. Lets not even mention if you go into a tunnel, or even a big building, where signal strength drops, or reflects off of objects, and the towers think you are somewhere else. These guys also told me, that if i really knew how 911 work, i'd be suprised that they could find anyone, even calling from a stationary phone. The frequency of dialing 911, and getting a dispatcher in a completely different county, that has no idea of the area, is astounding. You run into similar problems with GPS phones where you use satelittes, going into a building with metal roof, putting your phone in your car, if your car rolls over, you are screwed on GPS.
You are mixing two different types of areas there.
The land-line mixups are poor implementation or upkeep of the database (think reverse DNS) that the phone switch operators are supposed to be keeping.
Some tech somewhere needs to understand the phone routing and add the entries into the database. When a phone number is moved, it doesn't always get updated. Likewise, the geographic data used to determine the center called based on the location isn't always accurate.
That's above and beyond the general PIA of databases in the first place.
My part-time ISP employer is going through this as it tries to become a CLEC to cut dial-up line costs, so I have learned some of this firsthand. You ALWAYS need to tell dispatch WHERE you are first, clearly and as accurately as you can. Don't depend on them knowing where you are.