All Your Phones Are Belong To Us

Welcome to my first ever blag. Instead of talking about the wonderful news of Julian Assange's gain of asylum status, or the not-so-wonderful decision by USA's vassal state the United Kingdom to not recognise such status; which will be dealt with quite adequately on the interwebs (if you agree with freedom of expression and due process click here, if you don't, click here), I'll be taking about this guy who had the misfortune to be caught by the DEA with a (literal) truck-load of weed.

Now, there's no doubt that driving around with 1,100lb (500kg) of ganja in your mobile home can be construed as drug trafficking (even if you're going to a Burning Man festival), and sure, you'll probably need to launder some money, because if your profits from selling something that is less dangerous than cigarettes show up on  your taxes, you'll be heading straight to prison, because hey, we're talking about the USA, the land of the free orange jumpsuit.

The crux of the matter is though, that the DEA used his cell phone GPS data without a warrant to catch him, and that Supreme Court Judge John Rogers ruled (he) "did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data emanating from his cell phone that showed its location". (Source)

Ahhh the good ol' Supreme Court "where the Constitution don't mean squat" (Nixon, Futurama).

So there you go, you can buy your phone with your money, pay the monthly bill with your money, but it's not yours to have any privacy on; because, if conditions suit, it is just another one of the governments' tracking tools for you that  you're paying for.

And so if you are driving around with a truck full of weed,  take the battery out of your phone, and wrap it in its own tin foil hat. Because, even if you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that your own government won't destroy civil liberties to come and get you.