This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.
A lack of faith pretty well justified at this point.
I appreciate the annoyance at "oh noes teh NSA!", but this article exactly points out the problem: local, not state or federal, authorities are where this will be an issue.
Everyone is busy hopping on the "fuck the NSA" bus, and that conveniently draws fire from the numerous local police departments that are expanding their own reach.
Don't get distracted--the same data is just as dangerous (if not more dangerous) in the hands of local officials than some folks at an alphabet-soup agency.
do local police have access to this data though? Maybe I've missed something, but the cell phone data has been through PRISM, and that local police doesn't have access to this sort of information.
The issue is that the local Police are aggregating the same types of data E.G. Auto scanning tags of cars within sight of a police car and it's only a matter of time before the links are made to pool the data. All that needs to happen for this to become a reality is one piece of legislation be snuck into a spending bill or farm bill etc.. and bam - all police forces are required to send their data to the national data pool that all other police forces can access for the "greater good".
Not being involved in this myself I don't know the extent or the checks in place but police do have access to cell phone location data since about ten years ago? (if you call 911 on a cell phone they use it to find you)
You can do a lot of tracking without cell phone data.
Local police have access to license plate scanners (both at fixed locations and mounted on police vehicles). The data is not as fine-grained as GPS data from a person's phone, but it can also yield information about the patterns of a person's movements over time (e.g., they pass these ten intersections every weekend night between 2:30 and 3:00am). Of course, this can only track people with cars (but in some cities, that's pretty much everyone).
Facial recognition software can track people who walk, but I don't know how widely deployed it is at this time. As soon as it gets attached to all of the millions of surveillance cameras that are out there (some of which are operated by police departments, like in NYC), tracking pedestrians will become easier.
And, of course, the local police can get a warrant to attach a GPS device to somebody's car or to pull cell tower data if they have probable cause.
>do local police have access to this data though? Maybe I've missed something, but the cell phone data has been through PRISM, and that local police doesn't have access to this sort of information.
That's hardly an argument. For one, they collaborate frequently with the FBI. As for local police, well, give it time.
A lack of faith pretty well justified at this point.
I appreciate the annoyance at "oh noes teh NSA!", but this article exactly points out the problem: local, not state or federal, authorities are where this will be an issue.
Everyone is busy hopping on the "fuck the NSA" bus, and that conveniently draws fire from the numerous local police departments that are expanding their own reach.
Don't get distracted--the same data is just as dangerous (if not more dangerous) in the hands of local officials than some folks at an alphabet-soup agency.