As the marriage of big business/big government continues along its blissful path, we’re in store for yet another Orwellian development in this cozy relationship. The federal government now wants to be able to track individual cell phone use via the customer’s service provider without a warrant:

“…the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because 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.”

Notice how the Department of Injustice’s sharks get around the Fourth Amendment by saying that the phone company’s own records are obviously not the customer’s and, therefore, the phone company can do what it wants with them. Technically, they’re right. My question is this: If I started a phone company and made agreements with my customers that their phone records would be confidential and could not be released to any entity without the their permission, how long do you think it would be before the government tried to shut down my company if I didn’t comply with their request for any of my customers’ records? (Of course, since I would need a government license to even start my company, you can see how easy it would be for the government to pull my license if I didn’t “cooperate” with them.)

More glaring proof that we’re now in the 2nd year of a third term of the Bush Administration.

[Thanks to Travis Holte]