The Cellular in Cell Phone just might kill you.

While I have not finished any weekly readings feeling particularly secure, this week, to say I am rattled is a serious understatement. As McCullagh charmingly and convincingly describes: the time of a James Bond government is now. Only the super-agent technology isn’t only used to combat supervillains, it is used to combat citizens. I hope I am not undermining my unrest; there is a gross presumptuousness that pervades the court-rulings and general judiciary activity for all cases technological and privacy concerned. What exactly does it mean to reasonably expect a citizen was/is aware that certain private information is fair game for non-warranted evaluation? I understand that it is not the government’s responsibility if citizens remain ignorant to their rights (or lack there of), but this brings to light a particularly Digital Age-specific issue: when technology is constantly upgrading, evolving, and transforming how can the common citizen be expected to be constantly up to date with all of the new privacy-protecting-policies that develop? It is reasonable to assume, I suppose, that even without knowledge of the Smith v. U.S. case, a phone user is aware that the phone numbers he dials are logged by his phone company. He receives a bill every month that states as much. And as outlined in Warshak v. U.S., there is no infringement of privacy because the government is only accessing knowledge accessed by a third-party (ie. they are not listening into the conversation, or reading the content of an email). But, just because triangulation of location is generated only using “surface” information, and just because the phone company may make that triangulation itself, does not mean that the phone user can be reasonably assumed to know he is divulging his location to a log. Unless roaming or long-distance charges apply, the caller (or worse, the recipient of the call) has no reason to assume that the phone company is keeping record of his locational information. In this case, location has nothing to do with the transaction taking place. Therefore, the government is not merely gathering information collected and analyzed by the phone company, they are collecting and analyzing the information themselves.

There is another assumption of concern here, too. It would seem that the FBI is treating the cell-phone as a physical extension of its registered user. Without to the conversation itself, interrogating the receiver of a phone call, or accessing CCTV footage around the area from which the call was made, how can the FBI assure the call was made by the person in question? Are phones like cars and homes: (excluding theft) are their owners liable every time they are used? I’ll think twice before lending my phone to my druggie friends from now on. Wait, can the fact that I associated myself with drug-users on a blog be used to insinuate me in something?