Crapaganda.com

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all.

Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.

The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials.  But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests.  Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked.

Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ ”

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama’s Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government’s relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

How many of the owners of the country’s 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most “don’t have a clue,” says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey.

Read more at: The Snitch in Your Pocket (Newsweek)

“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)

Cell Phones Can And Are Being Used As Bugs