Cell Phone Surveillance Guide

Archive for the ‘Feds and State’ Category

The potential for the GPS surveillance industry is estimated at 20 billion dollars annually, but it may be constrained by privacy and legal issues. $20b a year — that’s a lot of suspicious lovers! Throw in cautious business practitioners and protective parents, and there is a huge number of people who are probably breaking the law by employing surreptitious cell phone surveillance.

In most civilized societies the kinds of surreptitious surveillance enabled by the products discussed on this site are illegal unless one gets a court order, or the expressed consent of the target. To be on the safe side, one should always consult local, state and Federal Laws before using cell phone surveillance technology. People using the technology to keep track of their kids have far less legal exposure than those using the technology to track an errant lover or business associate. Verizon and Sprint have cell phone plans that allow one to track others on a shared plan, but, again, this is legal only because it is done with the consent of those being tracked.

Horror stories abound of men stalking their wife/girlfriend using GPS technology. One guy in Oregon rigged a GPS cell phone up to his ex-wife’s car battery so that it would ring on ‘silent’ and automatically re-charge. He followed her every movement while driving, and even listened in on conversations in the car! Sure is a long way from Jake Gittes kicking out the rear tail light reflector on Evelyn Mulwray’s yellow Packard! The Oregon man’s heavy-handed stalking still managed to make his ex-wife suspicious, however. She pestered the police into checking out her car and they discovered the cell phone set-up.

One doesn’t have to purchase super-sophisticated spy software to track a target: five minutes alone with the target phone and it can be registered on the internet for GPS tracking, the confirmation messages erased without the target being the wiser. Or, one can buy a nice Timex watch for one’s Significant Other and the GPS technology inside can be tracked. It behooves anyone using this technology to act responsibility and be aware of the consequences.

Got Big Brother in your pocket?

Does the 4th Amendment exist anymore?  You know, the one that prevents “unreasonable searches and seizures”?

In this age of warrantless wiretaps and the “War On Terror” it might seem “quaint” to worry about whether the government abuses its ability to track us on our cell phones. But the question goes right to the heart of the rule of law. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) take any kind of warrantless surveillance as an attack on our 4th Amendment rights, and both organizations are currently fighting the US Justice Department’s use of warrantless cell phone GPS tracking.

Here is a statement issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

“Can the government use your cell phone records to track your physical location without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause? Often with EFF input as a friend of the court, the vast majority of judges issuing public opinions on the matter are saying ‘no’, and rejecting government applications for cell site location tracking information made without showing sufficient need for this kind of sensitive information.

This issue came to light in August 2005, when the first judge to publish a decision on the issue—Magistrate Judge Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York—publicly denied a government request that lacked proof of probable cause. In doing so, Judge Orenstein revealed that the Justice Department had routinely been using a baseless legal argument to get secret authorizations from a number of courts, probably for many years. Many more public denials followed from other judges, sharply rebuking the government and characterizing its legal argument as as ‘contrived,’ ‘unsupported,’ ‘misleading,’ ‘perverse,’ and even a ‘Hail Mary’ play. But the government continues to rely on the same argument in front of other judges, most often in secret and sometimes successfully.

EFF has been asked to serve as a friend of the court in several of these applications, successfully showing judges how and why the government’s arguments are baseless. EFF will continue to serve as a resource to courts and to counsel, to protect your privacy interest in your physical location, to stop the government from turning the cellular phone system into a vast network for warrantless physical surveillance and to ensure that Big Brother stays out of your pocket.”