"Is That Big Brother in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?"

[babylonsister]

Is That Big Brother in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
By Jennifer Granick


This morning, you left the house tagged with a tracking device that the government can use to find out where you have been and where you are going.

I'm talking, of course, about your cell phone. Mobile phones communicate continuously with cellular towers in order to receive calls, sending out a signal registering its existence and identity with the provider's nearest towers. The provider stores this cell-site data, which can be triangulated to determine the customer's physical location.

While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).

Why are courts treating past and prospective tracking so differently, and should they?

The problem starts with a basic congressional assumption that real-time information in transit is more private than stored information -- a bias that is enshrined in various laws that protect wire and electronic communications. Congress has imposed stronger limits on how real-time information is accessed and used.

The Pen Register statute grants the government access to real-time (in-transit) signaling (to/from) information upon an assertion that the information requested is "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." While cell-site data could be considered signaling information, Congress protected location information further under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which specifically prohibits using the Pen Register statute as the sole authority for obtaining physical-location information.

So the government argues that the Stored Communications Act is additional authority for its obtaining cell-site information with a mere showing of relevance. The SCA gives the government access to stored records or other information pertaining to a subscriber of an electronic communications service (not including the contents of communications) if the government "offers specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that ... the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

more...

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/commentary/circuitcourt/2007/09/circuitcourt_0925

[Trillo]

1. In return for the use of this data,

cell phone users should be paid, instead of having to pay, each and every month.

The corporatist is using consumers' information for the corporatist's own uses. Therefore, the direction the money is flowing in the monthly billing process is opposite to the direction it should flow.