For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
>The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant.
Or Trump can just put legal pressure on cell providers and they will bend the knee like everyone else, and CPB can easily have that data without problems.
Lets not pretend that that is the line they won't cross.
Those companies have been selling the data to the government without warrant for quite some time actually. No pressure necessary. Cops have money and Verizon wants it.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.