Are You Carrying a Tracking Device Everywhere You Go?
“One who does not wish to disclose his movements to the government need not use a cellular telephone,” -ROSLYNN R. MAUSKOPF (United States Attorney)
It may come as a surprise to most of the owners of the country’s 277 million cell phones but their cell phone company retains records of where their device has been at all times–either because the phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint the phones’ location to within areas as small as a few hundred feet.
Such location “logs” never show up on your monthly cell phone bill. But federal court records filed over the past year indicate that federal prosecutors and the FBI have increasingly been obtaining such records in the course of criminal investigations–without any notice to the cell phone customer or any showing of “probable cause” that tracking the physical location of the phone will turn up evidence of an actual crime.
“Most people don’t understand they are carrying a tracking device in their pockets,” says Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group that has been trying to monitor the Justice Department’s practice.
Much about the practice–including how many “tracking” records have been collected by the government–remains shrouded in secrecy.
Read more at: Can the FBI Secretly Track Your Cell Phone? (Newsweek)
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