For the greater issue of privacy in our ever expanding internet and connectivity age... I would like a tightening of privacy laws. But I am much less concerned about LEO exploiting my personal information than marketers and identity thieves.
Respectfully, you've admitted that you wish to pursue a career as a prosecutor.
The rest of us find this highly disturbing as it indeed makes it too easy for prosecutors and LE. Their job is supposed to be very difficult. The deck should be stacked against both, and it is not. It is only getting worse. Marketers are annoying, but they don't have the ability to use an essentially 'unlimited' amount of other people's resources. It's not about who is at the helm and if they are untrustworthy. If they work for the government, they are automatically untrustworthy as a collective group and must vigorously be kept in check.
I don't think 99% of government employees, including prosecutors and LE, are untrustworthy as individuals. Most of them are just normal people. But it is their job to take from the citizenry. Theoretically in return for services, protection, whatever. Problem is, all government entities have numerous incentives to expand their power and budget and very few, if any, incentives to safeguard the citizenry, aside from personal ethics. This imbalance shows in the "scope creep" of virtually every government entity over the last hundred years.
To put it bluntly, the legal system has very desire in the world to curb stomp the people, and the only thing with any teeth that holds them in check is the Constitution. Which they more and more blatantly ignore each year.
"Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure: and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws."
I have no idea how judges remotely can take this as anything other than "If you want to search someone's stuff, get a ****ing warrant."
But let's be honest. The legislatures, judiciary, law enforcement and prosecutors will continue to ignore this. I'm just going to start laughing hysterically when the average person begins to say, "I'm listening to your rules... why?"
It's likely that it'd be possible (if not necessarily feasible) to track an individual phone in real time, based upon tower TDOA or relative signal strength, but that level of tracking is likely to be done ad hoc, not all the time; it's too much info to store. The cell companies are already tracking tower/sector handoffs for historical and maintenance purposes, and that's why this info is available; because that info is so low-res, it registers slightly lower on my tin-foil-o-meter.
Not saying it's a good thing, just saying it's not like they can call up the phone company and find out the 10-foot radius you were in at 12:50PM on June 16th of 2009; best they'll be able to do is put you in a square mile or two, from historical records.
Just like to put out, the triangulation and storage mediums are both only getting better with time. Even without compression, you could hold a lot of entries of "Phone #, Date/Time, Coords" on a single terabyte. Care to imagine in 10 years how cheap that would be to store, especially if the government offered to pick up the tab?
