Privacy is becoming a rare thing these days in capitalist countries such as the USA.
They seem to be moving in the same direction as the old Communist Soviet Union was in terms of tracking their civilians activities in order to suppress civil disobedience and forward their power over the people.
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.
“You don’t know how much you miss something until it is gone.”
This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century,” says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. “If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.
Obtaining location details is now “commonplace,” says Al Gidari, a partner in the Seattle offices of Perkins Coie who represents wireless carriers. “It’s in every pen register order these days.”
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Personally I am surprised that the US Government and Phone service companies keep pushing for more and more tracking and spying on their own people without much if any backlash from the populous. It really is becoming similar to a police state, all they need now are security cameras, curfews and police checkpoints everywhere and they are set.
The EFF tried to uncover the scale of AT&T, Verizon and Sprints lobbying expenditures which are in the interest of destroying privacy, the companies tried to hide behind a legal wall.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been seeking records detailing the telecoms’ campaign for retroactive legal immunity under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Telecom immunity was enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
This decision is the latest setback for the government in its long-running attempt to delay disclosure of the documents EFF seeks. So far, EFF has obtained thousands of pages of records through this litigation.
“AT&T, Verizon and Sprint expended millions of dollars to lobby the government and get an unconstitutional grant of retroactive immunity for their illegal spying on American citizens,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “The public deserves to know how our rights were sold out by and for telecom lobbyists.”
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Big industries are running America, spending billions of dollars lobbying the government to pass laws in their interest. The middle and lower class people in America don’t have access to the large reserves of cash that these large companies have, and in my opinion Civil liberties are taking a back door to the wants of big industries like the Entertainment industry, Phone service industry and many others. They are fighting on an unfair field, one side has billions to spend while the other can only at most rally together a small protest.
It seems that Capitalism always ends up in the classic “Aristocrats vs. The Working Class” situation, the Aristocrats winning in the end because of the power they wield. Its written in history, and it will repeat itself, look at Europe, Great Britain was run by Aristocrats for ages and still is. They end up making the laws and exploiting the working class who don’t have the money or power to do anything about it. Anyone who has read up on this knows about the situation where the Aristocrats held almost all the land and taxed the working class people heavily in Britain to the point where they raked in huge sums of money and kept the working class from gaining any monetary power.
