EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE: The NSA Isn't the Only Government Agency Exploiting Technology to Make Privacy Obsolete -- For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with "burner" phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents "are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document," according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide. -- And it's true: the smartphone in your pocket is a tracking device that also happens to allow you to make calls, read email, and tweet. Several times every minute, your mobile phone lets your cell-phone provider know where you are, producing a detail-rich history of where you have been for months, if not years, on end. GPS-enabled applications do the same. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell for sure how long the companies hang onto such location data because they won't disclose that information.
QUESTION: If this is in fact true; how could John have been stalked and harassed for nearly 10 years without at least SOMEONE knowing SOMETHING about it? I tend to think there is much more secret prior-knowledge evidence available of this episode than the United States Government wants to freely admit to: https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty-free-speech/destroying-right-be-left-alone
"Cut the crap, man, this is Shaft." -- John Shaft
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