This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

New documents obtained by the ACLU indicate that many local police agencies are basically making up the rules of surveillance

and directing telecom firms to play into their error.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute comments.

We focus a lot on surveillance at the federal level, especially surveillance by intelligence

agencies and with good reason they have the most impressive

capabilities. You know no one can hold a candle to NSA when it comes on electronic

surveillance but one thing you can say about them is at the very

least they have dedicated lawyers who are intimately familiar with the

incredibly complex tangle of electronic surveillance laws that are supposed to

govern that activity and they are familiar also with precedence across the country limiting

that. It doesn't mean they don't push the envelope

when they can, but at least it means that when they strain the limits of the law or

the Constitution, it's deliberate, for whatever that's worth.

When it comes to local law enforcement,

what you see is, I think, much more often

investigators proceeding out of

in fairness is fairly Byzantine framework of statutes and so what we find in a trove of documents obtained from state and local law enforcement by the American Civil Liberties Union is an incredible array of different practices by different law enforcement agencies that have to do with obtaining

cell phone records, and in particular with using cell phones for location tracking,

effectively turning your cell phone into a personalized

tracking device. This is pretty significant because in a recent unanimous

Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court held that when a physical tracking device is used,

...