Well, howdy there internet people, let's bow again. So today we are going to talk about the

ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, privacy, the Fourth Amendment in your cell phone.

The ACLU just put out some information.

See back in 2020 the Wall Street Journal broke a story.

The ACLU's been following up on it ever since trying to use the Freedom

Information Act to gain access to information, to get some government records to

clarify what's going on. And it involves government agencies buying bulk

data that was retrieved from people's cell phones.

And according to the documents, the information is so specific that it could track people and develop

what they're calling a pattern of life.

That's pretty intensive surveillance, even though it's very passive.

Now a few years ago in Carpenter v. U.S.

The Supreme Court said, you know, you kind of need authorization to do

something like this and that was in a case about one person according to

the documents the a, has obtained, this practice can gather information

from more than 250 million phones every day. It's a big deal. They looked at a three day.

They looked at a three-day period and over that three-day period they found more than 100,000 location

markers and this is just from one area in the southwestern United States

because they've been having to fight to get the records so the records they

have are incomplete.

They don't actually show how widespread this is.

But the information that's provided with what they have is pretty startling.

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