Can the FBI secretly track your cell phone?
WASHINGTON - February 10, 2010 - The Justice Department is poised this week to publicly defend a little-known law-enforcement practice that critics say may be the sleeper privacy issue of the 21st century: the collection of cell-phone tracking records that identify the physical locations where the phones have been.
It may come as a surprise to most of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones, but their cell-phone company retains records of where their device has been at all times - either because the phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint the phones' location to within areas as small as a few hundred feet.
Such location logs never show up on your monthly cell-phone bill. But federal court records filed over the past year indicate that federal prosecutors and the FBI have increasingly been obtaining such records in the course of criminal investigations - without any notice to the cell-phone customer or any showing of probable cause that tracking the physical location of the phone will turn up evidence of an actual crime.
It may come as a surprise to most of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones, but their cell-phone company retains records of where their device has been at all times - either because the phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint the phones' location to within areas as small as a few hundred feet.
Such location logs never show up on your monthly cell-phone bill. But federal court records filed over the past year indicate that federal prosecutors and the FBI have increasingly been obtaining such records in the course of criminal investigations - without any notice to the cell-phone customer or any showing of probable cause that tracking the physical location of the phone will turn up evidence of an actual crime.
