Feds Order Google to Hand Over a Load of Innocent Americans' Locations (forbes.com)

This is disturbing. What ever happened to good old fashioned police work?

So, now the criminals will just turn off their phones and everyone _else_ will become a suspect

This is what happens when you technologically elect a surveillance apparatus.

They can do it retroactively too, which means effectively they're already monitoring the location of every American citizen as well as tapping all our phones. The stasi could only dream of such control..

Innocent, guilty, what I want to know is how the government can turn corporations into their personal database service. It's one thing to pop a tape out of the CCTV deck, quite another to tell a company, "go out of your way to run this query. Don't have one pre-canned? Write one." Same with telling Apple to write phone-cracking software: compelled speech?

In summary, what's to keep Google from telling them, "go do your own footwork."?

Why don't they just go to the carriers? They already track everyones location.