Quote Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost View Post
I think it is a serious problem.



You should have a much higher expectation of privacy, then. The basic rule of thumb should be that the private citizen has comprehensive rights to his privacy (over-ruled only by a warrant subject to severe scrutiny by a judge) whereas the government should have virtually no rights of privacy and should be, by default, transparent and accountable in almost every measure to the citizen.

Somehow, we have allowed our governments to turn this right on its head. Without so much as a whimper. All it has taken is a few lurid tales of the bogeyman.
I take your point, and concede that I may have been unknowingly duped by propaganda. OBL used to communicate via SatPhone, until some media bigmouth blabbed about it, and how DoD used it to track him. He, like we cel phone users, have no expectation of privacy when using that particular technology; it's no different than using a Citizen's Band Radio - to which anyone with a receiver can listen... or even a backwater internet gamer's off-topic forum - anyone can register and "listen in", from gamers, to police, to terrorists, to parents to children.

Our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, IMO, does not apply to cel phones, becauste it is not unreasonable for anyone to pluck signals out of the public air. If signal scrambling & unscrambling technology got more widespread, thereby demonstrating the users' and receivers' intent to privacy, THEN I think we'd have a case to justify outrage. An analogy might be the envelope-encased letter vs the postcard. The envelope demonstrates my desire to protect the contents of the letter, whereas a postcard offers no such protection - and none is sought (obviously) by the sender.