Obama Admin "No right to privacy"Follow

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html

So are the same libs that rode W for 8yrs on warrantless wiretapping going to do the same now?

Bearing in mind that 'tracking' and 'tapping' are 2 different words that aren't even spelled the same, it continues to amaze me that varus is deluded into thinking that one administration is any different than another.

As I've said in the past, yes.

I am of the personal opinion that there is no issue with wiretapping or listening in on my calls as I'm doing nothing wrong. However, I am of the opinion that we should only allow so much of this crap before we become a police state and a line needs to be drawn somewhere. This looks like as good a place as any other.

If I were American, that is.

It is different, although I would argue that it is still a problem, and I don't agree with the Administrations stance on it.

I like that varrus has some kind of compulsion about shortening peoples names.

Edited, Feb 11th 2010 1:47pm by Xsarus

I see you're using a teleprompter.

I never expected hope and change. But I'm pessimistic when it comes to the intentions of politicians of any stripe.

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...

But they don't. Well... Not really. Tracking what numbers are called from a phone helps create associations and give directions for investigations. What does this do? So if a drug dealer was caught dealing, we check out system and then start investigating anyone who was in close proximity to said dealer over a period of time? That's not only invasive, it's not terribly useful...

If you want to know if a particular person went to a particular place at a particular time, there's some value. But that falls into the realm of a search warrant. Simply recording the movements of a large number of people "just in case" they need it goes a pretty big step past logging phone calls made.


I'll also point out that there's a difference between logging the location a phone was at when it made a phone call, and using GPS or signal triangulation to constantly record where every cell phone is at any time and keep that in some big database. The first is probably reasonable for a subpoena situation, the latter should require a search warrant IMO because you're not just logging use of a system by the customer, but actually using the cell phone as a remote tracking device.

You're right. They were simply recording the movements of a large number of people as a function of providing them service and the ancillary effect was that it was needed.

Unintentional consequences of technological advances are a *****.

Edited, Feb 11th 2010 2:57pm by BrownDuck