This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 25, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Obama administration recently argued in court that it can track your location using your cell phone all day, every day, and never implicate your Fourth Amendment right

against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Jim Harper, director of the Cato Institute's Information Policy Studies, says it's a troubling claim based on a poor understanding

of privacy and of the Fourth Amendment.

The Obama administration argued in federal court and an appeals court recently that Americans have no

Fourth Amendment interests, no Fourth Amendment rights in data collected through

their cell phones including location data.

Not only GPS enabled phones, but all cell phones have rather sophisticated tracking capability

because they obviously have to report to the local cell tower regularly and cell

systems are actually designed to triangulate down to a fairly good level of

accuracy on where people are for a regulatory requirement called E911

so that cell phone callers can get emergency services.

The government argues that there's no Fourth Amendment interest on the part of cell

phone users in that data about their use of cell phones.

And it springs originally from a pair of cases under the Bank Secrecy Act, in which the government argued successfully that a requirement

that banks collect data about their clients did not implicate Fourth Amendment rights.

And then in a subsequent case,

the government argued successfully

that requiring the banks to turn over that data

to the government didn't implicate Fourth Amendment rights

...