Obama Says: You Have No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy to Your Cell Phone Logs

Remember when Bush was President and everyone had their panties in a twist over the warrantless wiretapping of foreign phone calls? Liberals were apoplectic about it and sued all the way to the supreme court to make him stop. Angry, they used the privacy issue to justify voting in a half-black man who has never held a real job at a private company. So what does our new President do? He says the government can now track all your movements at home and abroad, and you have no reasonable expectations of those movements being private. That’s hope and change you can believe in.

From CNET here:

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration tracked a tractor trailer with a drug shipment through a GPS-equipped Nextel phone owned by the suspect. Texas DEA agents have used cell site information in real time to locate a Chrysler 300M driving from Rio Grande City to a ranch about 50 miles away. Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile logs showing the location of mobile phones at the time calls became evidence in a Los Angeles murder trial.

And a mobile phone’s fleeting connection with a remote cell tower operated by Edge Wireless is what led searchers to the family of the late James Kim, a CNET employee who died in the Oregon wilderness in 2006 after leaving a snowbound car to seek help.

The way tracking works is simple: mobile phones are miniature radio transmitters and receivers. A cellular tower knows the general direction of a mobile phone (many cell sites have three antennas pointing in different directions), and if the phone is talking to multiple towers, triangulation yields a rough location fix. With this method, accuracy depends in part on the density of cell sites.

Anyone with an iPhone understands how the map feature works. It uses triangulation between cell towers to pinpoint your position. Soon there will be apps available to allow you to track your friends or even strangers based on social networking settings. And the government will be doing this too. So all you leftists that feel betrayed by Obama and his spying on your every movement, just take some tin foil and wrap your phone in it.