The frustrating and alarming element of the following story isn’t that law enforcement uses cell phones to track suspects–that is reasonable. The part that is problematic is that some in law enforcement seem to think that mere suspicion or allegation should be enough to allow them to do it. Like discussions of wiretaps and whatnot, too many in the government seem to think that warrants are nothing more than nuisance and evidence
just a bother.
Via WaPo: Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request
Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.
In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.
To me this is part of a mindset that pervades much of law enforcement (and, by extension, domestic anti-terrorism activities) that equates suspicion with guilt, and then guilt with the notion that anything goes in the name of enforcing the law. Such attitudes manifest in small ways, like tasering student and motorists who are not utterly obsequious to the police and large ones, like detaining an American citizen without charges for multiple years.
It is an attitude that we should seek to curtail in our government.
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November 24th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
It’s hard to ‘curtail’ a “What Me Worry” attitude.
Personally I’m done trying to talk sense to them.
I will forever hold this Congress, the 109th and 110th, in absolute contempt for the lies proffered by both the Right and the Left under the guise of ’security’, but in particular for the complacency and aquiesence of Left.
In the public domain there are facts and figures easily accessable to the public and to the Congressional members to absolutely prove that under a post 9-11 Bush government and with this Congress’s trashing of our Constitutional rights, we are in fact woefully less succesful in the conviction rate for authorized wirtetaps than ever before.
-In 1998 under Clinton and the infamous Janet Reno:
1329 wiretaps were authorized -which led to 5590 arrests. 3179 of those arrests led to convictions from the wiretapped evidence -a 56% success rate.
-In 2002,under Bush and post 9-11, the ‘authorized’ wiretaps had changed little, increasing to 1358.
3,060 were arrested -with only 493 convictions.
Under Bush’s ‘terror watch’ it still gets worse…
-In 2006 the ‘authorized’ wiretaps increased to 1839.
4376 people were arrested -but convictions had dropped to an astounding 493. A rate of only 16.2%.
For the Supreme Court and Congress not to extrapolate from those figures a sense that a grave injustice is being committed to not only those in Guantanamo but to all those arrests never reported from illegal wiretaps -here in our own backyards and on our own home soil.
A few final note:
Check out the Texas v California and New York figures. Texas, a border state, with all those drugs and dangerous immigrants? AWOL -did less than Wisconsin.
And wasn’t it Janet Reno breaking downs doors to find illegal immigrants, while the Right screamed foul??
http://www.uscourts.gov/library/statisticalreports.html