Your Cellphone: "No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy"

The latest position of the Obama Administration on cellphone privacy.

Add this to the things that make you go hmmm....
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Is there an “expectation of privacy” pertaining to your cell phone’s records? Or any records held by a third party provider?

The Obama administration is arguing that there isn’t:

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their—or at least their cell phones’—whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

In other words, since the provider keeps the records (not you) as mandated by law, those records belong to them and thus should be open to government inspection without permission from you or a court.

Now, there’s an argument to be made in terms of law enforcement needs. For instance, a series of bank robberies took place over a wide area. Combing the records for cell towers in the area of each robbery allowed law enforcement to narrow it down to two cell phone users who made calls in each area just before the robberies. Good police work. But shouldn’t they have to go before a judge and justify their desire to look at these records? I’m not sure they didn’t, but essentially the Justice Department is trying to argue that such a justification and court order should be unnecessary.

Ironic from an administration that was so strident about opposing warrantless wiretaps.

The question is, should those records be considered private? Jim Harper argues at Cato that those records are the modern equivalent of “papers and effects” protected by the 4th Amendment and that the court has misinterpreted that since 1967.

These holdings were never right, but they grow more wrong with each step forward in modern, connected living. Incredibly deep reservoirs of information are constantly collected by third-party service providers today. Cellular telephone networks pinpoint customers’ locations throughout the day through the movement of their phones. Internet service providers maintain copies of huge swaths of the information that crosses their networks, tied to customer identifiers. Search engines maintain logs of searches that can be correlated to specific computers and usually the individuals that use them. Payment systems record each instance of commerce, and the time and place it occurred. The totality of these records are very, very revealing of people’s lives. They are a window onto each individual’s spiritual nature, feelings, and intellect. They reflect each American’s beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and sensations. They ought to be protected, as they are the modern iteration of our “papers and effects.”

I agree with Harper. Technology has changed how those records are kept, but they are still private records between the provider and the subscriber – especially since, for the most part, much of the data recorded is gathered without our permission. What I see in the case by the Obama administration is another attempt at government data mining – domestic intelligence – something which Democrats and libertarians were adamantly against when various schemes were uncovered during the Bush administration.

This attempt is subtly different. Instead of just assuming that there is no expectation of privacy and going ahead and demanding the information, the administration is attempting to have the court okay it first. But the result will be the same – unimpeded access by government to your location at any time (as long as you have a cell phone). It is but a short step from there to do what Harper outlines: data mining from various other providers based on the same argument and with this case as precedence. Result: a profile of you containing private data about your movements, spending habits, places visited on the internet, etc that are really none of the government’s business.

Of course, we all know that Big Brother government would never misuse or abuse this information, don’t we?

As Harper concludes, this is an imporant case which needs to be watched closely:

This is a case to watch, as it will help determine whether or not your digital life is an open book to government investigators.

http://www.qando.net/?p=7079

The Coming Perfect Economic Storm

Maybe you caught Henry Paulson and Alan Greenspan on "Meet the Press" last Sunday morning, or maybe you didn't. Either way you didn't miss much, except the fact that they both looked like they were lying through their teeth. Paulson was VISIBLY shaking as he answered questions in that halting delivery of his, there were times when he seemed almost too frightened to speak. He was hiding something. Something BIG.

NOTE: Watch Paulson's left thumb as he tries to speak at about 3:15 into the video!

Then I found this from Minyanville in my email:

Last week, Ron Coby talked about how US markets were developing large head and shoulder tops.

In this video (SEE BELOW: They have made changes to the internet where you can't download stuff like you used to.), Ron Coby talks about how this played out across weekly charts and the global markets, and why he believes we could be seeing a perfect storm for global markets. If so, what's the upside of down in 2010?

Click here to watch the video.

Kondratiev Waves

I won’t bore you with the details of the makeup of K-Waves, just that the primary data points are related to wholesale prices which, as you can see in red in the chart above, have sky-rocketed since 1940. But the author briefly describes the general theory of Kondratiev waves…

A Kondratiev economic cycle is divided into four “seasons”, spring, summer, fall and winter. The analogy of the seasons is consistent with what you would expect. Spring is a time of re-birth after a long hard winter, time to sow, plant and produce. Summer is lazy and full of doldrums. Autumn is a time to reap the harvest and store the results of the spring work and winter is a dangerous time when those that survive are the ones that successfully harvested what they produced and safely hunkered down against the bitter elements.

The four seasons in a 50-60 year Kondratiev Wave are:

•Spring (20-25 years) – Inflationary phase with rising stock prices and increased employment and wages.
•Summer (3-5 years) – Stagflation phase with rising interest rates, rising debt and stock corrections. Imbalances lead to war.
•Autumn (7-10 years) – Deflation phase where falling interest rates lead to a plateau and stock prices increase sharply.
•Winter (3-5 year collapse and 12-15 year readjustment) – Depression phase with stock and debt markets collapsing and commodity prices increasing.

Those that argue for the validity of Kondratiev waves say we are just entering the Winter Phase. Note that the above chart indicates the winter has started and will perhaps bottom around 2016.

In 1929, the a wave collapsed from $386 dollars to $195 dollars, a total of $191 dollars, or almost 50% of its value in a single drop.

In 2007, the a wave collapsed from $14280 dollars to $6440 dollars, a total of slightly more than 50% of it’s value in a single drop.

This is a chart showing the Dow Jones Industrial Average during the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression









This is a chart showing the 2007 Crash and the projected Great Depression II

In 1930, the b wave rallied back from $195 dollars to $297 dollars regaining approximately 53.5% of the value it had lost. In 2010, the b wave rallied back from $6440 dollars to $10767 dollars regaining approximately 55% of the value it lost.

As interesting as those comparisons are, even more uncanny is the comparison of the moving averages and Bollinger band properties. Looking at the dashed inserted area copied from the 1929 chart, you can see that the Bollinger bands, the 55 day and the 233 day moving averages are a nearly identical fit and the 21 day average is very close. Only the 144 day average is slightly askew due simply to a difference in the internal price fluctuation between the 55 and 233 day averages. While the visual and technical continuity are quite astonishing, the predictive implications are just as amazing…

Remember that the K-waves and the constant dollar Dow charts both pointed to the stock market bottoming around 2016? Well, note that the bottom of the inserted portion of the 1929 chart appears to bottom in the early part of the year 2016.

And finally, Robert Prechter’s group at Elliott Wave International predict that the Dow will bottom at around $400 dollars. Note that a projection of the bottom of the inserted chart section points to approximately $400 dollars.

http://www.thepanicnews.com/

It's that last part, the $400 value DOW! It's now valued at over $10,000! If this is even CLOSE to being right we haven't even begun to see the bottom regardless of what Paulson, Greenspan, Bernake or Geithner say.

It looks to be an awfully stormy summer!

(And many summers to follow.)

I HATE Horror movies so I add this with trepidation not wanting to cause undue fear but, the truth is truth and it is the truth that sets us free. May God have mercy on His people!