(Before It's News)
Police and government have also been using cell phone jammers in a number of
places. The Federal government has discussed implementing in-car jammers in
order to enforce anti-texting and hands-free laws,[ href="#ref-20150923_1">1] in part, at the urging of articles in the
Journal of the American Medical Association.[ href="#ref-20150923_2">2] While the FCC insists that use of cell
phone jammers is illegal[3] at least
one commercial site offers cell phone jammers for use in prisons[ href="#ref-20150923_4">4] and at least one corporation has been
caught using cell jammers to prevent it’s employees from communicating while on
the clock.[5]
License plate readers have been deployed in fixed locations and mobile vehicles to read and track all license plates traveling through certain locations.[6] Public interest groups,such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center[7] and Electronic Frontier Foundation[8], continue to oppose such activity and have recently obtained judicial review of the practice. Until such time as a court orders its halt or a legislature intervenes, however, it is very likely to continue or expand.
Legislation was passed to reform NSA data collection, however, it was limited in application, rife with loopholes, and had no particular disclosure or enforcement mechanism.[9] When Congress allowed certain Patriot Act provisions to lapse, the NSA was permitted to revert back to old mechanisms and did so within two days.[10] Perhaps, to nobody’s surprise, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled in June, 2015 that bulk collection of domestic phone calls could be resumed.[11] After all, politicians themselves are targets of the spying and have been for years. “The way ECHELON had been designed,” she said, “the targeting of U.S. political figures was not an accident.”[12] U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein openly accused the CIA of spying on her and the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014.[13] It was a charge that they never refuted and appears to have been true.[14] Senator Feinstein, despite her professed outrage at the actions against her and her office and Congress in general,returned to championing domestic spying within a year, claiming that the programs do not constitute “mass surveillance” and that they are necessary to combat “evil”, even though warrants were only sought in 12 of 288 queries about possible suspects.[15]
President Obama issued a memorandum in February, 2015 directing federal agencies to develop policies and protect privacy and civil rights,[16] however there are a number of loopholes hat allow the requirements to be evaded, such as “unless retention of the information is determined to be necessary to an authorized mission of the retaining agency, is maintained in a system of records covered by the Privacy Act, or is required to be retained for a longer period by any other applicable law or regulation.”[17] Essentially,if the agency can articulate a reason to keep the data, or promise that it is stored safely, it will be kept.
Source: http://survivalblog.com/29405/
