TPMMuckraker Electronic Communications Privacy Act
Surveillance
How Easy Is It For The Police To Get GPS Data From Your Phone?
Justin Elliott | December 9, 2009, 2:13PM
Police can in some cases track cell phone location by merely telling a court that the information is relevant to an investigation, a legal expert tells TPM -- a fact that may partly explain how law enforcement racked up 8 million requests for GPS data from a single wireless carrier in a year.
An increasingly popular and easy-to-access surveillance tool for police, GPS data is not currently protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the standards for gaining access to the information are murky and highly variable. That's partly because one of the statutes that bears on the issue was passed in the mid-1980s, before many of the technologies involved were invented. And Congress hasn't done much to update the law since.
The issue at stake is the demise of so-called "locational privacy."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS (35) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (4)Topics: American Civil Liberties Union, Chris Calabrese, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Fourth Amendment, GPS, Global Positioning System, Orin Kerr, Sprint, Surveillance, U.S. v. Knotts, William Rehnquist, locational privacy
Muslim Mafia
CAIR Sues 'Muslim Mafia' Author Over Property Lifted By Undercover Intern
Justin Elliott | November 2, 2009, 2:45PM
Muslim Mafia Co-Author David Gaubatz
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has sued the author of Muslim Mafia, a book that sparked calls by four House Republicans for an investigation into intern spies, seeking the return of documents taken by the author's son while he was posing as a Muslim and interning at CAIR's Washington office.
The suit alleges that Chris Gaubatz, son of book co-author Dave Gaubatz, took over 12,000 documents along with electronic information when he was posing as convert Dave Marshall in 2008. It quotes the book itself, which says Gaubatz routinely loaded the trunk of his car with the files.
Politico's Josh Gerstein reports:
PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (4)Topics: CAIR, Chris Gaubatz, Dave Gaubatz, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Ibrahim Hooper, Muslim Mafia
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