Justice Department Says You Have No Expectation of Privacy When Using Cell Phones

Written by Kevin on 11 February 2010

Wow! For all those people who kept skewering the Bush Administration for warrantless wiretaps of suspected terrorists in the United States it seems the Obama Administration is taking that ball and running with it at full speed. Their argument is that if you’re using your cell phone on public streets that you have no expectation of privacy with regard to your conversation or your location.

… the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Further down in the article we also find this little gem:

In addition to a search warrant not being necessary, prosecutors said, because location “records provide only a very general indication of a user’s whereabouts at certain times in the past, the requested cell-site records do not implicate a Fourth Amendment privacy interest.”

The Obama administration is not alone in making this argument. U.S. District Judge William Pauley, a Clinton appointee in New York, wrote in a 2009 opinion that a defendant in a drug trafficking case, Jose Navas, “did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the cell phone” location. That’s because Navas only used the cell phone “on public thoroughfares en route from California to New York” and “if Navas intended to keep the cell phone’s location private, he simply could have turned it off.”

When do we have expectation of privacy? You don’t have it at the airport because the government can search you without probable cause. Local police can set up random check points and pull you over, again without probable cause, in attempting to find drunk drivers. There are municipalities that have passed no smoking ordinances preventing people from smoking in their own homes.

Enough is enough already. Leave us alone.

Read the CNet story on the federal government’s push to track your cell phone.

Tags: 4th amendment, barack obama
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