BrownDuck wrote:
gbaji wrote:
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.
That's absolutely not what happened in the case described in the article. Nice straw man attempt though.
In the example case in the first paragraph? Or the actual case being considered? Or the multiple examples of tracking mentioned farther down the article?
See. I read
the whole article, not just the first paragraph or two. Specifically:
Quote:
Whether state and federal police have been paying attention to Hollywood, or whether it was the other way around, cell phone tracking has become a regular feature in criminal investigations. It comes in two forms: police obtaining retrospective data kept by mobile providers for their own billing purposes that may not be very detailed, or prospective data that reveals the minute-by-minute location of a handset or mobile device.
The use of "retrospective" data isn't that much of a deal. Every single time you make a cell phone call, part of the data of the call is which cell towers were in range for the duration of the call. It's not rocket science to use triangulation to know approximately where you were while making the call. And guess what? That data is already being collected by the cell phone companies cause they kinda have to in order to manage their own phone systems. The police absolutely can subpoena that information and it doesn't become "stale".
If you'd read farther down the article, you'd have noticed that the second type of tracking was talked about. That form requires that the cell phone company actively track your phone even when you aren't making a phone call. It is that form of tracking which most people are most concerned about and which should certainly require a warrant to obtain.
If you guys had read the entire article you'd have understood that this is what I was talking about in the previous post...
Edited, Feb 11th 2010 6:06pm by gbaji 
