In 1984, Rockwell — the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. — had a hit with the novelty song “Somebody’s Watching Me.” The song, about a sense of paranoia, peaked at no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and then was promptly, and deservedly, forgotten.
Rockwell, however, was on to something, and the song’s chorus tells us why:
I always feel like
Somebody’s watching me
And I have no privacy
I always feel like
Somebody’s watchin’ me
Tell me is it just a dream
Rockwell, it wasn’t a dream.
Today, we live with the specter of a federal government wiretapping our phones and encouraging our neighbors to spy on us. Our due process protections have been eviscerated in the name of an amorphous war on terror and the separation between domestic and foreign security has been all but removed.
And now, as The New York Times details this morning, police departments have gone a step farther, to a more pernicious invasion: the tracking of cell phones.
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, documents show.
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 both emergencies and routine investigations.
With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.
Some may view this as a necessary evil, arguing that you have nothing not worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong and that we need these aggressive measures to keep us safe. But that argument excuses a whole array you bad behavior one the part of law enforcement and other government agencies.
The notion of limited government is being debated in the courts right now, focused on the president’s health reform legislation and, particularly, its requirement that everyone purchase insurance. The mandate — of which I am not a fan — appears to me to be constitutional.
But expanded surveillance, which is happening because technological changes are outpacing the court’s ability or desire to control, is exactly the kind of abuse of police power that the Founders feared when they appended the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. For the first, fourth and fifth amendments to mean anything, they must extend to modern means of communication. The Founders knew nothing of cell phones and computers, GPS systems, credit cards, but they have become a central part of our lives. The requirement that law enforcement have probable cause needs to be enforced better in the digital realm if the liberties we hold dear remain alive.
Hank Kalet 