Stop the Presses: The Justice Department wants more wireless location tracking

In a superb example of the left hand of the Government of not knowing what the right hand, a representative of the Ministry of Justice of the United States recalled a Subcommittee of Senate today that his agency wants to require carriers to keep records of the location and the web sites they access on their wireless Smartphones for users.

"When this information is not stored, it may be impossible for the application of the Act to gather essential evidence," Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein told the Subcommittee of the judiciary of the Senate on privacy, technology and the law.

Senator Al Franken, D - Minnesota, does not buy. Franken called the hearing, he said, to discuss the mobile users right to know "who has their information and what they do with it.

Franken the Jurassic era of NBC Saturday Night Live fans remember him with a parabolic antenna tethered on his head. Despite his embrace technologies based on the location early, Franken showed that it is no fan of tracking features.

Point of view of the SCA

At the same hearing, a representative of the Federal Trade Commission said the FTC believes wireless carriers and device manufacturers should follow only the data needed to provide a service or complete a transaction.

The Ministry of justice told Congress in January that ISPs and providers of wireless should have to store data user for two years.

"In many cases, these recordings are the available evidence only that allows us to investigate the crimes on the Internet who committed." "They may be the only way to learn, for example, that a certain Internet address has been used by a particular human being to commit or facilitate a criminal offence," Weinstein said Congress in April at a hearing on mandatory data retention.

In his opening statement by Bud Tribble, Apple VP of software technology, Franken asked why official response from Apple for tracking of Rabat was quite describe the monitoring of the location of the cool things, while CEO Steve Jobs said that there was no tracking.