US Justice Dept. Sued For Cellular Tracking Information

tpaudio writes "The ACLU and the EFF are suing the Department of Justice over how the government might be using GPS and location data from cell phones. With over 200 million Americans carrying cell phones, this could be pretty important for setting guidelines. We have already seen other frightening powers related to cell phones, such as 'cell mic tapping.'" The ACLU press release is also available, and it contains links to the complaint and the Freedom of Information Act request. We've previously discussed instances of cell phone tracking in the US and elsewhere.

Open Phone Firmware solves this...

[mwilliamson]

This is exactly why we need phones with open firmwares running fully-published and open peer-reviewed code. I hope the openmoko comes close.

Urgh. Bad movies predicting our future.

[billeater]

Worse than all the privacy implications, this is making Enemy of the State [imdb.com] look plausible.
--
billeater - lower my bills [billeater.com]

Re:Ever get the feeling...

[R2.0]

The ACLU is widely seen by conservatives as a thinly veiled political organization with far left/communist leanings. The fact that they have not changed their stance on the Second Amendment after the Heller decision is seen as final confirmation of this: their policy has been to defend individual rights, not collective rights, therefor they didn't see it as their purview to defend the Second Amendment. Now that the Supreme Court has stated that the Second describes an individual right, the ACLU's response has been "The Supreme court is wrong, it's still a collective right, and we won't pursue any gun cases".

As for the less conservative and/or less politically aware, the ACLU has defended some astoundingly distasteful people and organizations - NAMBLA, Neo Nazis, Westboro Baptist. They also take the most extreme interpretation of any given right; for instance, Spam is free speech, and prisoners should have the right to solicit for "penpals and jobs" (read "pussy and drug couriers) online. Their logic is that they need to defend the most extreme so that the more mundane rights will be secure; while this has a certain logic, when combined with the fact that they routinely refuse to take cases that aren't "important enough" leads to charges that they are simply grandstanding and glory hounds.

Personal opinion? The national ACLU is filled with political whores who are into it only to get their names in the news and bring down "the man". My understanding is that the local units are much more in touch with real life issues, but are quite underfunded and their mission gets undercut by the national organizations stunts.