"While the ruling is troubling on a number of levels the concept itself is fine. "
There is another aspect to it that is being ignored here, and by the court as well.
Other courts (I don't have a specific citation at hand, but it's been in the news) have ruled that while collecting specific data may not be a search, aggregating data over time can constitute surveillance or a search subject to 4th Amendment protection.
I think it is pretty clear that cell phone location data is aggregated over time, and can reveal things about one's life that even a direct search (or police "tail") might not do. So it seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of data is covered by that precedent, but this court ignored that.
"After all, they need the location data for billing purposes."
I would argue over whether they even need this much... to a degree anyway.
On a typical plan, all they need to know is: "Is it 'native', or roaming?" and "Is it long distance, or local?"
Because most plans only distinguish between home area and roaming, and long distance or local. And some unlimited plans do not even do that. Further, most cell plans don't even distinguish between local and long distance anymore, as long as it is within the U.S.
So the location data in most cases can be broadened to simply "Were they in their home coverage area?" Which, for many providers, is a rather large percentage of the U.S.
Yes, the nature of cell phones does require fairly specific location data at the time of call. But there is no user-specific need to retain those records.
Your post is ironic given that this article is about the public policing itself. I wouldn't be surprised if civil litigation came out of this. We'll see.
The one time someone said to me: "I'm placing you under citizens arrest"
My reply was "Go fuck yourself"
and when the police showed up, it wasn't me that got carted off to jail.
People need to learn about their rights.
"That's kind of a huge abdication of responsibility on his part, don't you think?"
No, I don't. He sent it to supposedly responsible news media outlets, whose job arguably *IS* to sort those things out.
"... many of the documents were simply things we didn't want the entire world to know, but didn't actually indicate any wrongdoing."
Yes, that's true too. But I just don't really know if it would have been possible for him to separate them all out.
Someone else here reminded me that Manning actually delivered these documents to others, who WERE supposed to try to separate that out. But somebody goofed. So I'm not sure that can honestly be blamed on Manning, who actually did make an effort to expose wrongdoing while not releasing those other things to the public.
"It's fascinating how psychological projection is invisible to the projector."
Yes, isn't it?
The is the biggest software pirate I know. I don't feel sad for them.
"It's true that one of those organizations screwed up and released a private key that let everyone see all the documents but that was clearly not Manning's fault. No one defends that mistake. No one thinks it was right for all the documents to be released to the public. "
Thank you for reminding us all of this. I am ashamed to admit that I had forgotten.
fortune: No such file or directory