BrownDuck wrote:
Sir Xsarus wrote:
I don't see any difference between listening in on a cell phone or a land line. I'm not sure why I wouldn't have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy.'
Accessing phone call logs is vastly different than tapping an individual's conversations. I don't really see a problem with the former, especially if done indiscriminately, as the FBI did in the case the article mentioned.
Oddly, when I argued this same point, most of the people on this board disagreed...
I'll also point out that there's a vast difference between accessing phone logs (what numbers a phone calls and when), and using the gps unit in your cell phone to track where you are at any point in time.
That's a much more significant intrusion on people's privacy. However, it's also something that is legally hard to fight. The same processes that track what numbers you dial, also track where you are. Cell phones don't work if the cell phone system they're operating on doesn't know where they are.
I guess my larger question is why would they need to do this? If they're looking for a specific person, that's one thing, but the heat the Bush administration got was for doing blanket searches of call logs to search for patterns and connections between groups of phone numbers so that if they say capture some terrorist with a cell phone they can very quickly find the numbers of all the phone's he's been in contact with. There's a rational reason to have that data available and configured for doing that sort of search ahead of time. I suppose we could argue that by keeping a track of people's cell phones, we could quickly backtrack where someone has been, but that's already available on a one-off basis now. I just think that this goes an extra step into the murky waters of this issue...