Cell Phone Tracking

We talked about the use of cell phones for tracking proposes in Wednesday's meeting. This week two separate judges ruled against government requests for "real time" tracking ability of cell phones. Using elements of the Patriot Act, government officials have in the past only need to say the information obtained through tracking was need for it to be allowed.

However, Judge Orenstein of New York in one of the rulings wrote

When the government seeks to turn a mobile telephone into a means for contemporaneously tracking the movements of its user, the delicately balanced compromise that Congress has forged between effective law enforcement and individual privacy requires a showing of probable cause

The EFF was one of the groups that fought on the side of privacy in this case.

Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief (.pdf) in the New York case, says the Justice Department may have been using cell phones to track people for a long time, since judges typically don't publish opinions on such orders.

"This is a true victory for privacy in the digital age, where nearly any mobile communications device you use might be converted into a tracking device," Bankston said in a statement. "Judges are starting to realize that when it comes to surveillance issues, the DOJ has been pulling the wool over their eyes for far too long."

Bankston noted in an interview that the Justice Department attempted to convince Orenstein he had the authority, under another federal law called the All Writs Act, to order the cell phone tracking by revealing that other judges had used that statute to authorize real time tracking of credit-card purchases, which the government referred to as a "Hotwatch Order."

More Information:
EFF: USA v. Pen Register
EPIC: Wiretapping

Broadcast flag

Since the case, Sony vs Universal in 1984, it has been cosidered fair use to record TV shows for later viewing. Of course, the MPAA is never one to respect fair use and has been constantly fighting against this right. Their newest plan is the broadcast flag.

A broadcast flag is a set of status bits (or "flags") sent in the data stream of a digital television program that indicates whether or not it can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content. Possible restrictions include inability to save a digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of recorded content (in order to share or archive), forceful reduction of quality when recording (such as reducing high-definition video to the resolution of standard TVs), and inability to skip over commercials.

So far 20 congress members have voiced support for it.
More information at
Stopping the Signal: Broadcast Flag Update #2
Stop the Broadcast Flag (Again)

First Post!

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