Grits for Breakfast: Cell phone location tracking by government: How it’s done:

Grits for Breakfast: Cell phone location tracking by government: How it’s done:

Thanks so much to readers who contributed funds for Grits to attend a conference at the Yale Law School hosted by their Information and Society Project on “Location Tracking and Biometrics.” Thanks also to the organizers for putting together this extraordinary event. This is the first installment of a series of Grits writeups from the conference.

Christopher Soghoian, an electronic privacy researcher and activist, opened the one-day conference with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis from 1928 in Olmstead vs. United States in which he opined, “The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping.” Boy, was that a prescient observation! Unfortunately, he made that comment in a dissent and SCOTUS would not actually require a warrant for the government to wiretap phones until 1967, by which time not just law enforcement but numerous private entities engaged in rampant wiretapping, according to Prof. Susan Freiwald from the University of San Francisco. Then, in Katz v. United States, the high court finally, belatedly issued a warrant requirement and the following year Congress banned the practice for private entities as well.

The debate over wiretapping finds many parallels in the internet era since today when not just government but numerous private entities engage in all sorts of surveillance activities, many of which people either passively or voluntarily opt into by using smart phones and other modern gadgets. A recurring theme throughout the event, which I’ll expound upon in a later post, was that the ability of private companies to invade privacy in many ways exceeds that of the government. Unfortunately, for the most part government can usually access that personal information without a warrant because it’s considered a third-party business record.

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