If that's true we are moving into a scary world pretty much like 1984 where everything you do is monitored all the time.
Well, not everything. Plant a GPS tracker on a police car or a bug in the restroom at FBI headquarters and you'll soon discover some troubling asymmetries in the modern post-privacy paradigm.
Theres no need to plant a GPS tracker, the radio protocol almost all police/fire/EMS use is called P-25[0]. Even when both parties remember to enable encryption, the protocol still has a long list of security of security vulnerabilities including the ability to jam it (both broad range and single user jamming) with the radio embedded in a childrens' toy because of poor implementation [1,2]. The protocol is so bad in fact that it could easily be used as active location tracking silently. Here is a talk about the complete list of fail [3]
A RaspberryPi(or similar) with a $12 TV tuner software defined radio, and a small database of the various frequencies and bands particular flavours of your local LEO and/or federal TLA use.
I know our local highway patrol, for example, use at least: P25, police issued cell phones, iPads with cellular data, HF radio (at least on rural/country cars), and whatever they use for the data connection for their in-car computers.
Most/all of that would be encrypted, but hey - metadata's a free-for-all according to them, right? I bet if you knew what to look for, you could quite reasonable detect the presence of a highway patrol car when you saw some digital P25, a cellular connection on the bands used by the contracted cellular provider, and I'd bet good money that patterns of encrypted data that things like ALPR systems send would be quite distinctive...
That's all staying pretty solidly at the whitehat end of the wide grey space of "what's allowed". If you were much closer to the blackhat end of that spectrum, I'd also bet pretty good money that sophisticated criminals are already exploiting GSM and 3/4G weaknesses to individually identify cellular radios by cracking the encryption to see the IMSI data. And that'd all be passive and undetectable, if you were firmly in the blackhat camp, active attacks against their P25 radios can (as pointed out) be done for effectively zero dollars.
They are helpful enough to announce their locations to the dispatcher on every call. It would not be difficult to find a specific unit if you wanted to.
I was thinking the same thing. If no warrant is required then anybody can record whatever they want, right?
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I can't figure out how this could possibly be legal. It seems to me the rule for recording conversations is 1 party consent. [1] There is no way the FBI is participating in those conversations it's recording. I have no problem with law enforcement having special powers, but, isn't that special power a warrant?
Whether a warrant is required is a federal Constitutional question. Requiring consent to record a conversation is a statutory creation (and state law at that). State law doesn't define what does or does not violate the Constitution.
I spent far more time reading about this than a sane person ought to. I was all raring to make procedural arguments about obtaining warrants, and another crazy tangent about Katz.
But really, It's easy. Put the audio online. Make it all public. Obviously, there should be some time constraint, can't expose an ongoing investigation. Maybe a year after charges are filed? Perhaps a year after trial, to avoid messing with jury pools.
I think this is a pretty great general policy. Police record whatever they want. If the police overstep and record stuff that turns out was private, the people are free to sue. Seems like a nice self balancing amount of surveillance.
Secretly stepping on peoples privacy rights is pretty much consequence free. Publicly stepping on peoples privacy makes the line very bright, and easy to avoid crossing. It also plays neatly into the "honest man has nothing to fear" trope.
Presumably State law still applies to the activities of FBI employees in that state, unless the Federal government has passed a law specifically exempting them.
Courts have held that the California law does not apply to wiretaps by federal agents authorized by a valid federal warrant. For example, federal agents may go to federal court and obtain a warrant to place a wiretap in California, even though state officials may be barred by state law from obtaining a wiretap under similar circumstances.
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In general I suspect they cannot be prevented by local state laws from doing their jobs.
That example is not precisely on point though, because it involves a federal warrant - there's no doubting that the US Government can pass laws overriding relevant State laws where it has jurisdiction, and Federal warrants are ultimately authorised by a Federal law.
Yeah this is not an exact case, the quote mentions the warrant part as well (that is why I pasted that part in), but thought it was similar because it is still Federal agents, in their line of duty, and court declared they get to disregard state laws.
The other interesting aspect is this is looked what Federal agents can do, not "How can we protect the privacy of our citizens? Let's see what we can do for them. Maybe they are entitled to more privacy because they live in California". This mirrors the attitude of the "expert" in the story, they just see the Constitution as an inconveniance you need to bypass in order to get your job done.
You don't even need to go that far. Try to find the salary scales or FOIA the salary data of police. In most places, they cook up some reason why it's protected information.
In many states, every aspect of public employee compensation is publicly available. As it should be. Public safety folks are usually exempt.
In Germany, these are (relatively) public; on the shoulder flaps of any regular police officer (except the riot police <insert deserved swear word here>) you have the rank insignia which allows one to approximate the salary level.
Police officer personal income varies wildly from $30k to $400k per year, quite unpredictably, in the US. Overtime pay, bonuses, double-dipping by being "on call" for Fire Services while actively writting traffic tickets, etc. There is much variability and many factors.
Which is why the corruption is even worse. When before, the dirty tricks bag was mostly limited to domestic threeletters, largely due to tech limitations, now that both technical and legal barriers are lowered, every public figure of power is now more vulnerable than ever before.
Its closely related to the issue of gov mandated backdoors, in which the gov erroneously claims only they can do it, but in reality a backdoor is a backdoor for anyone.
Now, as for me, where did I put my camera detector/focused emp burst gun?
Well, not everything. Plant a GPS tracker on a police car or a bug in the restroom at FBI headquarters and you'll soon discover some troubling asymmetries in the modern post-privacy paradigm.