Big Business and Big Government: Dragnet Surveillance Already the Norm from the FBI to the Local Police

If only there were some kind of document that outlined the established powers of government, and provided for reasonable and rational limits to what that government is legally allowed to do, and if only it were faithfully enforced and adhered to, we would live in a very different world. The war on the Fourth Amendment continues apace.  From Wired:

The nation’s mobile phone carriers received more than 9,000 requests last year for cell-tower dumps, which identify every mobile phone at a particular location and time, often by the thousands.

The revelation, revealed in a congressional inquiry, underscores that domestic authorities, from the FBI to the local police, are performing a massive amount of surveillance on Americans on domestic soil, sometimes without probable-cause warrants.

Figures provided by the nation’s largest carriers, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, and smaller companies, like C-Spire and Cricket, show that the carriers overall got as many as 1.1 million requests for customer cellular data last year. They’ve earned tens of millions of dollars processing the data, the records show. . . .

But the most startling figures show that the authorities are obtaining information on the whereabouts of perhaps thousands of people at once, often by a judge’s signature based on assurances from the authorities that the data is relevant to an investigation.