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.
Target Corp said data from about 40 million credit and debit cards might have been stolen from shoppers at its stores during the first three weeks of the holiday shopping season.
