{"id":7092,"date":"2012-05-09T18:04:03","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T18:04:03","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T18:04:03","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=7092","title":{"rendered":"The Dead Past, by Alex Kozinski"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dead Past<\/a>, by Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 117<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

I have worried a good deal about that fish bowl over the years, and it seems pretty clear that it\u2019s getting smaller, and its walls are getting more transparent. To give just one example, the other day one of my sons sent me a link to a satellite picture of my house from Google Maps. You could not only see the house in pretty clear detail, but you could see who was home, from the two cars in the yard\u2014my son\u2019s blue Subaru and my brother-in-law\u2019s gray Avalanche. I was very happy that I hadn\u2019t been taking one of my famous nude sun-baths on my patio.<\/p>\n

I flew here today from Los Angeles. I drove to LAX, landed at San Jose Airport and a student drove me to Palo Alto. Who knows this? Big Brother knows. Why? Because I carried my cell phone, and who doesn\u2019t carry a cell phone nowadays? The cell phone logs in every few minutes to a nearby cell tower, so if you obtain the telephone company\u2019s records, it\u2019s pretty easy to piece together exactly where I\u2019ve been all day. And, if you have the student\u2019s cell phone number, you\u2019d also know how long we spent together and where we went.
\nDoes the government obtain such records to check people\u2019s alibis in case they are suspected of crimes? You bet they do. In fact, if you left your phone at home that day, so there\u2019s no cookie-crumb trail to show you were somewhere else, prosecutors will argue that you not only committed the crime, but premeditated it as well\u2014by leaving your cell phone at home so your steps couldn\u2019t be traced. China has taken this to another level: Earlier this year, Beijing officials announced that they intend to use cell phones to monitor the movements of twenty million residents\u2014\u201cto ease traffic and subway congestion.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}