You’re a nice person, Gentle Reader; I’m glad to communicate with you in a public forum and listen to your responses.
But we both expect limits to this mutual access. If we’re not legitimately suspected of being criminals, we expect to go about our business without strangers intruding upon us at will. We have a right to boundaries.
More and more, though, the borders of the privacy we rely upon are routinely violated by government employees who trawl our lives at random. We often have no idea of the existence or extent of the intrusions until long after the fact.
The latest disturbing practice we’re getting a smidgen of info about is the secretive use by police agencies of so-called “sting ray” devices, which simulate cell towers to track cell phone data and location.
For years, obeying FBI demands for secrecy, prosecutors have been dropping cases rather than report how the devices are deployed. In a Baltimore murder trial, though, Detective Michael Dresser testified that his department has used the device 4,300 times. He assures us that officers await judicial permission . . . unless the circumstances are too urgent.
That’s nice. But without a lot more transparency about how and when the sting ray is deployed, I don’t have much confidence that such scrupulousness is par even in Baltimore, let alone all other locales. It’s hard to give government agencies the benefit of the doubt when the track record is so lousy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
