This is a difficult issue. For most of us, our cell phone is where our body is, so you're tracking the person. It is easy to imagine ways that this data could be abused.
On the other hand turn it around. Suppose that there was a rash of burglaries and you were the investigating officer. Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened? This kind of speculative data mining could be a good source of leads, but you can't engage in it unless you have a lot of data on a lot of innocent people. (And, as always with data mining, until you have the data, you don't know what questions you want to ask of it.)
But the problem is that if the data is centralized and accessible, the minority who would abuse it will access it as well. And the worse abusers are people like Hoover and Nixon - people who will use this data to try to push political aims.
> Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened?
There was also a recent case where the FBI was looking for a person distributing child pornography on Youtube. They found that 3 of his IP addresses originated at hotels. So they cross-referenced the hotel guest registries and identified the one guy who had been registered at all the hotels at the relevant times.
This seems like a perfectly legitimate method of investigating a crime and I don't think anyone is arguing that police ought to be prevented from doing what they did with the Scarecrow Bandits.
The problem is that the Government wants to be able to target a person and track their movements via a cellphone based only on a showing of reasonable grounds to believe that the location data is relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation. This essentially allows the government to conduct fishing expeditions.
> the worse abusers are people like Hoover and Nixon - people who will use this data to try to push political aims.
I would submit that, given the ability to abuse such centralized and accessible information for political aims, a large percentage of people would do so; incentives have a remarkable way of corrupting power. And that's precisely why I oppose such things even when I have nothing to hide.
I don't see it as a difficult issue at all. The effects of false positives (and they are going to be mostly, almost totally, false positives by definition) in your scenario make it a non-starter, period. For property crimes?
I can see a rationale that they aren't really false positives since nobody is being accused or whatever, but that's just moving the goalposts such that it becomes OK to investigate random people like Nixon and Hoover (et al), but I will put good money down on the eventuality of someone with a criminal record, a cellphone, and an airtight alibi getting their home raided and them being injured or killed.
Of course it's a good source of leads, for some value of "lead." That's the problem. By way of analogy, there are plenty of people, some of them extremely high profile, who have criminally affected the world's economies and are getting away with it right this minute, so maybe let's take care of the crimes we have actual evidence of laws being broken before we get all Inspector Gadget about relatively minor crimes.
The only difficult part of the issue is how to explain it in a way that portrays it as both harmless and necessary, because it's neither.
Remember that false positives aren't really a problem to police and especially prosecutors. Most criminal cases in the US don't go to trial, so they just want enough to sweat people into plea-bargaining.
>On the other hand turn it around. Suppose that there was a rash of burglaries and you were the investigating officer. Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened?
Do people seriously believe that investigative detectives for burglaries (or even murders) have such clout and influence as to pass federal laws concerning wiretapping and phone tracking?
This is all about the government wanting the extra ability to gather data on citizens, for political reasons.
The 2012 version of the huge files J.E. Hoover had on everyone that mattered then.
Comments
This is a difficult issue. For most of us, our cell phone is where our body is, so you're tracking the person. It is easy to imagine ways that this data could be abused.
On the other hand turn it around. Suppose that there was a rash of burglaries and you were the investigating officer. Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened? This kind of speculative data mining could be a good source of leads, but you can't engage in it unless you have a lot of data on a lot of innocent people. (And, as always with data mining, until you have the data, you don't know what questions you want to ask of it.)
But the problem is that if the data is centralized and accessible, the minority who would abuse it will access it as well. And the worse abusers are people like Hoover and Nixon - people who will use this data to try to push political aims.
Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened?
I can see allowing this -- with a warrant. I'd tempted to say it will stop working after the first few arrests but criminals can be pretty stupid.
> Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened?
This kind of thing does happen and I don't have a problem with it. It's how the FBI caught the "Scarecrow Bandits" in Texas. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html
There was also a recent case where the FBI was looking for a person distributing child pornography on Youtube. They found that 3 of his IP addresses originated at hotels. So they cross-referenced the hotel guest registries and identified the one guy who had been registered at all the hotels at the relevant times.
This seems like a perfectly legitimate method of investigating a crime and I don't think anyone is arguing that police ought to be prevented from doing what they did with the Scarecrow Bandits.
The problem is that the Government wants to be able to target a person and track their movements via a cellphone based only on a showing of reasonable grounds to believe that the location data is relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation. This essentially allows the government to conduct fishing expeditions.
> the worse abusers are people like Hoover and Nixon - people who will use this data to try to push political aims.
I would submit that, given the ability to abuse such centralized and accessible information for political aims, a large percentage of people would do so; incentives have a remarkable way of corrupting power. And that's precisely why I oppose such things even when I have nothing to hide.
I don't see it as a difficult issue at all. The effects of false positives (and they are going to be mostly, almost totally, false positives by definition) in your scenario make it a non-starter, period. For property crimes?
I can see a rationale that they aren't really false positives since nobody is being accused or whatever, but that's just moving the goalposts such that it becomes OK to investigate random people like Nixon and Hoover (et al), but I will put good money down on the eventuality of someone with a criminal record, a cellphone, and an airtight alibi getting their home raided and them being injured or killed.
Of course it's a good source of leads, for some value of "lead." That's the problem. By way of analogy, there are plenty of people, some of them extremely high profile, who have criminally affected the world's economies and are getting away with it right this minute, so maybe let's take care of the crimes we have actual evidence of laws being broken before we get all Inspector Gadget about relatively minor crimes.
The only difficult part of the issue is how to explain it in a way that portrays it as both harmless and necessary, because it's neither.
Remember that false positives aren't really a problem to police and especially prosecutors. Most criminal cases in the US don't go to trial, so they just want enough to sweat people into plea-bargaining.
Right, the same as the DoJ peeps who are going to be defending this: the ends justify the means.
>On the other hand turn it around. Suppose that there was a rash of burglaries and you were the investigating officer. Wouldn't you want to be able to find all cell phones that were in proximity to a significant number of the burglaries at the time that they happened?
Do people seriously believe that investigative detectives for burglaries (or even murders) have such clout and influence as to pass federal laws concerning wiretapping and phone tracking?
This is all about the government wanting the extra ability to gather data on citizens, for political reasons.
The 2012 version of the huge files J.E. Hoover had on everyone that mattered then.
It's not about "stopping crime".