FBI tracks suspects' cell phone without warrants

newsweek.com

25 points·HeliumOxide··7 comments

Sprint developed a web application for law enforcement to track people, and they don't require a warrent just a claim that it's an emergency, an 'emergency' constituting things such as labor union protests.

God this is horrible for so many reasons.

Title is uninformative: suggest change to the title text of the page, "FBI Tracks Suspects' Cell Phones Without a Warrant".

"tape made by a privacy activist who sneaked into the event." Anyone else find this statement ironic?

Only if you consider observing "the event" (a government-sponsored security conference, albeit a "private" one) a violation of someone's privacy, I guess. If there's any irony at foot, surely it's your attempt to invoke "privacy" as a defense against exposure of the governments' invasions of privacy.

I wasn't really "defending" anything, but whatever. You're the one saying that someone (the privacy advocate in this case) should be able to unilaterally violate someone's privacy, not me.

You're the one claiming releasing a quote by Sprint's "manager of electronic surveillance" about how the _company_ Sprint releases private personal information, a statement which the company also confirmed publically on the record, constitutes a unilateral violation of the personal privacy of said "manager of electronic surveillance". Absurd.

No, I said that a privacy advocate should be able to "unilaterally" sneak into a privacy conference for the purpose of exposing government invasions of privacy.

If someone sneaks into the private homes of Verizon executives to spy on them, that's rather different. But that's clearly not what happened here.

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