Obama administration seeking warrantless tracking of cell phones

Remember the cries of George Bush’s evil warrantless wiretapping program? The program where domestic calls may be tapped if you happened to call foreign terrorists? Well, now there is a real warrantless program – this time courtesy of the Obama administration – who want to tap the locations of mobile phones. Patiently awaiting the outcry from the watchdog media and civil rights groups.

From cnet news (emphasis mine):

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, 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.

Now I don’t care whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, but the aforementioned media and so-called civil rights groups certainly do. Our Fourth Amendment rights are just as infringed whether it’s Obama or Bush doing so.

While not doing anything illegal is usually a good defense against breaking the law, we now have a government who considers abortion opponents, war veterans, and Tea Party attendees as potential terrorists, and not openly-serving jihadists in our armed forces. Perhaps it would behoove us to see whether the Constitution protects us from the government tracking our locations through our cell phones before going with what the Holder Justice Department says.