Not all news is good news coming from the Obama administration. While the American media focuses on the economy and Cramer vs. Stewart, lost is what is going on with some of our civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
The Obama administration voted for Immunity for the Telephone Companies from lawsuits for participating in the Bush administration’s domestic spy program and included new and broad warrant-less surveillance powers in the bill.
However, that isn’t the only infringement the administration has made in it’s first 100 days in office. They have also decided that the Constitution does not protect cell-site records. A cell site record is essentially information about what cell phone tower your cell phone is connected to. Effectively giving away your approximate location at all times that your phone is on.
Now I’m all for using creative ways like approximating a persons location at a certain day/time to put them at the place of some sort of crime. I’m with that. I loved the HBO show “The Wire” and can appreciate law enforcement doing everything they can to catch the bad guys. It has to be within reason though. If you need this cell-site record to help solve a crime get a warrant and you get the records on that phone. What is the point of having everyone’s cell-site records available to the government though? Why does the government need this info so readily available without a warrant?
Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation stated, “Almost everybody in the United States carries or will carry a cell phone… This tracking ability is a means where the government can find out the location of pretty much everybody without much effort or expense.” (from a wired article)
I realize we are in slightly different times. No president wants another 9/11 under their watch. Why keep tabs on everyone though? Why not just the bad guys (or potential bad guys). And then if they do the tracking just for the bad guys, who’s to say who’s a bad guy? Under what criteria are you categorized as a security risk or terrorist? The US Terror Watch list currently holds over 900,000 names and bio’s and adds about 20,000 names to the list every month.
Obviously I’m not the president and am not in charge of protecting millions of American’s. I am not trying to trivialize “the big picture” in terms of keeping America safe. Be that as it may, I still like to adhere to what the founding fathers had in mind. One of my favorite persons of all time, Ben Franklin, was quoted to say, “He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.”. I think that quote really sums up the point of this post.
Note: Next time I kill a hooker I’m definitely turning my phone off so Big Brother cannot place me at the scene of the crime.
Really bud what are you worried about. No one you know will be tracked by the feds. I think your privacy of sending scandalous tex messages is safe.