NEW YORK (PNN) - May 17, 2013 - A federal judge recently ruled that if someone has their cell phone turned on, their location data does not deserve protection under the Fourth Amendment, meaning terrorist pig thug cops can track individuals without a search warrant.
New York magistrate judge Gary Brown decided in favor of terrorist Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who were seeking his approval over a warrant on a doctor who they suspected was being paid for issuing thousands of prescriptions. The warrant would have compelled the physician’s phone company to provide real-time tracking data from his cell.
Brown, certainly to the delight of pig thug cops everywhere, issued a 30-page brief outlining his opinion that, by carrying a cell phone, someone is essentially waiving their Fourth Amendment right to due process.
"Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off,” Brown wrote.
He goes on to suggest that because there are smart phone applications available that allow users to locate people in their area with similar interests, cell phone customers should not expect their inherent right to privacy to be observed.
The Amerikan Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long been a voice for the Amerikan people against governmental overreach and technological surveillance. Chris Soghoian, a principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the ACLU, wrote that Brown’s opinion was “ridiculous”.
“There is a big difference between location information you knowingly share with a select group of friends (or, in fact, the world) and information collected about you without your knowledge or consent,” he wrote.
Exactly how common this practice is throughout the terrorist pig thug cop community is unclear but it has widely been reported that a Michigan terrorist pig thug cop force tried to gain information about every single cell phone within the proximity of a labor protest.
Congressional leaders are currently considering two laws that would address how freely terrorist pig thug cops are able to bug citizens. During an April hearing on Capitol Hill, one detective told Senators that warrantless geolocation tracking is “essential to obtain in the early stages of investigations when probable cause has not yet been established.”
That attitude, and the wide potential for abuse this kind of law creates, has the ACLU alarmed.
“Someone might be happy to share their location with a few friends by ‘checking in’ using Foursquare while at a music festival, but not want (terrorist pig thug cops) to access that same information,” Soghoian continued. “They would still reasonably expect that their location a week later at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or abortion clinic should remain private. Sharing location data isn’t and shouldn’t be all or nothing.”