It may be true that “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” as President Obama declared in the wake of revelations of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, but the fact remains that the devices we use are constantly leaking private information – our location, who we talk to, the duration of our calls, Wi-Fi networks we have connected to in the past, unique identification numbers of our mobile devices, and so on. Criminal hackers, corporate actors and governments around the world are ecstatic about the weak standards, backdoors, and exploits that they can use to vacuum up data about you, while your Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures is shoved as far as possible into an unregarded corner.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of yet another dragnet surveillance program – this time, it’s run by the U.S. Marshals:
