EDITORIAL: Privacy victory on cellphone listening devices

Americans scored a quiet but crucial victory this month in the defense of their rights against an overreaching federal government that too often refuses to acknowledge that its powers are limited.

A year ago, the Review-Journal told the story of a local man who discovered a cellphone listening device hidden somewhere near the South Point hotel-casino off Las Vegas Boulevard. The device — one of about 20 similar devices discovered across the nation — is known as an IMSI catcher. It impersonates a cellphone tower and intercepts a signal, allowing the user to break into nearby cellphones and collect their data: contacts, call records, emails — everything.

Now, everyone put on your shocked face. It turns out the federal government was behind them, and that few people understood how often federal agencies were using the technology — without oversight or accountability. Over the past year, judges, lawmakers, privacy advocates and the media have pressured the government to figure out who was using the devices, and how and why they were using them.

As reported this month by the Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department finally admitted to deploying the devices without warrants for use in data fishing expeditions, and said it would add more judicial and internal supervision to the program.

According to the Justice Department, supervisors now will be required to track more closely how the devices are used, as well as instruct investigators to delete all data collected on innocent Americans as soon as they apprehend their targeted suspects. This must be done at least once a day. Until this week, there was no policy on how long the data could be kept. (The changes don't apply to local and state police departments, which set their own rules in the use of IMSI catchers and answer to local judges, nor do they apply to secret Justice Department operations in Mexico and elsewhere outside our borders.)

The increased supervision is an excellent development, but it's troubling that such federal initiatives can go on for so long without any meaningful oversight or judicial review. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, federal law enforcement is even more hostile to Americans' constitutional rights. Does it really take a formal policy to get agents to be truthful with judges?

The devices most commonly take the form of portable boxes that sit in an investigator's car while he or she searches a neighborhood for a suspect's phone. Other types of the devices are used in planes to scan thousands upon thousands of phones over larger areas. As with other forms of law enforcement snooping and searching, such measures are perfectly acceptable so long as police can demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant.

By now, Americans should understand that there is no such thing as digital privacy — not when China and Russia are hacking public and private entities around the world, not when the U.S. government collects data like a vacuum sucks dirt, and certainly not when more and more Americans create weak Internet passwords and share everything about themselves on social media.

Although privacy is essentially dead, our constitutional rights aren't. But we'll lose our liberties, too, if we aren't willing to fight for them every single day.