> 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.
Comments
> 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.