The USA has already killed people based on trivial amounts of data such as, "A had dinner with B who is C's relative. Thus even though A is US citizen in a foreign country, we will blow up his car with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone because C is a known terrorist."

Do you have a link for that?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/yemeni...

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror...

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/us-drone-str...

(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...)

   Verint, which also has substantial operations in Israel, declined to comment 
   for this story. It says in the marketing brochure that it does not use 
   SkyLock against U.S. or Israeli phones, which could violate national laws. 
   But several similar systems, marketed in recent years by companies based in 
   Switzerland, Ukraine and elsewhere, likely are free of such limitations.
   
   At The Post’s request, telecommunications security researcher Tobias Engel 
   used the techniques described by the marketing documents to determine the 
   location of a Post employee who used an AT&T phone and consented to the 
   tracking. Based only on her phone number, Engel found the Post employee’s 
   location, in downtown Washington, to within a city block — a typical level 
   of precision when such systems are used in urban areas.

What is legal and normal now may be illegal and dangerous later and the then government could go back and look for "troublemakers" by examining old data to check for subversive comments. Good luck explaining your comments from 15 years ago when you get dragged off to a secret court for "terrorist" behaviour based on comments and opinions of many years ago.

What about supposedly innocent tracking data. Suppose you had to visit the dentist several times in quick succession and suppose your dentist office was located very near to a known terrorist cell. Now you are in a database of people to watch. Several years later you have to make repeat visits to some other location which by sheer coincidence is near another terrorist cell. You are now a hot hit and this triggers a series of events starting with the IRS doing a full audit on you and your friends /family potentially followed by much worse.

This is not science fiction but easily plausible. The more data you have, the easier it is to establish causal relationships which are not real, but could have real consequences when some government or other organization takes an interest in you.

In reality the systematic break down of privacy and systematic increase of power to those who are committing them eventually leads to oppression and near total control.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/stasi-files-revi...

Unless you've got something to hide that you're worried about...?

Clearly, hiding anything is evil and people hiding anything are isomorphic with terrorists. :|

I have the opposite concern. There's really not much that Iran can do to an American citizen continents away. The NSA, on the other hand, can target, track, and detain me without any recourse.

This is a very naive illusion.

Their intelligence agencies have a long history of doing things to their own citizens around the world too.

It's naive to think Iran is more dangerous than the US government.

slides from CCC in case someone is interested.

That said, it would be quite nice to have an open API where I could query an area for the count of cell phone users active there. Of course this should have upper and lower bounds on the area, perhaps on its shape too. I emphasize that it is just count that I seek, not querying the location of a specific cellphone.

Is anything like this available, free, for a fee, for specific providers ?

Would that thwart this particular tracking?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Eq...