Mediaboss Marketing

If the Founders and Framers knew about U.S. marshals' reported airborne collection of cellphone data from thousands of innocent Americans while pursuing criminals, they surely would shout, Get a warrant!

First reported by The Wall Street Journal, this program began outrageously violating Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure around 2007. Cessna aircraft, covering most of the U.S. population from five unidentified metro-area airports, carry devices that mimic cell towers, fooling cellphones into reporting their general locations and unique registration information.

These devices supposedly distinguish between innocents' cellphones and those of fugitives, drug dealers and others under criminal investigation. But they can gather data from tens of thousands of phones, encrypted or not, in a single flight. And while court orders supposedly are obtained for these flights, those orders are sealed.

Given how wide a net is cast, it's hard to see how those court orders could be as specific about what's to be searched, for what purpose as search warrants must be under the Fourth Amendment.

The ACLU's chief technologist says judges approving this dragnet surveillance program likely don't realize its scale. Such widespread snooping on innocents is the result of overreaching law enforcers and compliant judges disregarding constitutional wisdom.

You are solely responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our Terms of Service.

We moderate comments. Our goal is to provide substantive commentary for a general readership. By screening submissions, we provide a space where readers can share intelligent and informed commentary that enhances the quality of our news and information.

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. Because of the volume of reader comments, we cannot review individual moderation decisions with readers.

We value thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point quickly and politely. We make an effort to protect discussions from repeated comments either by the same reader or different readers.

We follow the same standards for taste as the daily newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. Don't include URLs to Web sites.

Read the original here:
Snoopers flights: Air raid!