1984 - Police are tracking your cell phone

“Posterity!  You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom!  I hope you will make good use of it.  If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.”   John Adams 

1984  -  Political hacks from both parties are falling all over themselves to create a Big Brother Police State

• Police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track your cellphone signals for them.
• Bill of Rights violated, no search warrants are issued.
• Police departments have purchased their own tracking equipment to watch you.
• America is rapidly becoming an elective dictatorship.  Voters have the "right" to select which party they want to violate the Constitution.

Big Brother is watching you . . . and "they" say it is for your own protection.
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Local law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.
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The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for routine investigations reports the New York Times.
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Civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in non-emergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.

• In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of non-emergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.
• In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.
• In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.
• In Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment. 

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(New York Times)

"People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."

- George Orwell  (1984), Book 1, Chapter 1