The cost of surveillance has plummeted in the era of cell-phone location tracking,
reported Andy Greenberg at Forbes. His Jan. 9 article begins:
It’s no secret that the ability to track a cell phone has led to a
sea change in law enforcement surveillance methods. But now a pair of
researchers have actually put a number to the plummeting cost of that
covert spying in the modern world: Tracking a cell phone’s location,
they found, costs somewhere between 1.9% and .015 % of the price of
tailing someone the old fashioned way.
In a paper published
Thursday in the Yale Law Journal, privacy-focused researchers Ashkan
Soltani and Kevin Bankston have calculated the per-hour cost to law
enforcement of tracking a person’s location using every method from
officers on foot to police-planted GPS devices to obtaining the
suspect’s location from their cell carrier. The results show that the
cost of 24/7 surveillance operations have been reduced from hundreds of
dollars an hour to employ teams of agents to track individuals in shifts
to just a few dollars or even just pennies to query AT&T or Sprint
for the same location data. ...
With their study, the researchers intend to show that cell phone
tracking, like GPS tracking, is so cheap that it enables surveillance on
a massive scale. In fact, their paper deduces a “rule of thumb” from
the Jones ruling and other lower-court rulings to determine
when location tracking without a warrant should be considered
unconstitutional: “If the new tracking technique is an order of
magnitude less expensive than the previous technique, the technique
violates expectations of privacy and runs afoul of the Fourth
Amendment,” they write.
That means cell phone tracking, which is often even cheaper than the
warrantless GPS tracking the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in
Jones, require the same level of privacy regulations if not more,
Soltani argues. “When it was physically impossible to track everyone at
the same time, you didn’t need a law for it,” he says. “What we’re
saying is that technology changes what’s possible, and as a result, we
may need to add legal barriers to compensate for those changing
technical barriers.”
Read Soltani and Bankston’s full paper here.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment