Texas Fights Back Hard Against “Warrantless Cellphone Tracking”

So there are two bills under consideration in the Texas state legislature that could represent a huge victory for champions of privacy against the national surveillance state.  As such, we need to spread the word to as many people as possible and provide support to the activists in Texas that are leading the charge.  Obama’s ridiculously authoritarian Department of Justice believes that regular citizens have no expectation of privacy if we carry a GPS device on our cellphones.  Free human beings beg to differ.  From Slate:

According to the Department of Justice, cellphone users can be tracked without a warrant because “no reasonable expectation of privacy” applies to location data. But lawmakers in Texas disagree—and are proposing strict new tracking regulations that could place the state at the forefront of nationwide efforts to rein in government surveillance.

Two identical bills filed at the end of last month in the state House and Senate propose a series of amendments to the Texas code of criminal procedure. The bills, submitted by Rep. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, and Sen. Juan Hinojosa, D-McAllen, would in all but exceptional cases require law enforcement agencies to get a search warrant to obtain cellphone location information—whether the phone is being tracked in real-time or retrospectively.

In addition, the amendments would oblige all telecom providers in the state to produce an annual transparency report showing the number of surveillance requests made, broken down by each law enforcement agency making the request and detailing the type of data desired. They would also limit the amount of time a judge can keep secret a court order issued to authorizing tracking. This would mean that after 180 days the order would have to be “unsealed” and revealed to the public, unless there is “good cause” shown to further extend the secrecy.

Last year, a congressional inquiry revealed that the major wireless carriers received more than1.3 million requests for subscriber data from law enforcement in 2011 alone. This revelation disgruntled privacy and civil liberties groups nationwide, and it’s possible that legislators in other states may follow Hughes and Hinojosa’s lead in proposing that warrants be required before accessing location data. It’s unclear, of course, whether the bill will eventually become law, as police in the state can be expected to lobby aggressively against it.

The DOJ will no doubt be watching developments in Texas closely—hoping that a backlash against warrantless tracking in the state is not the start of a trend.

Let’s hope it is.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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