I usually place my cell phone on "Airplane Mode" once I get to church, but I may want to start turning it off before I leave home.
From the Daily Signal,
As worshippers gathered at the Calvary Chapel in 2020, they were being watched from above.
Satellites were locking in on cellphones owned by members of the nondenominational Protestant church in San Jose, California. Their location eventually worked its way to a private company, which then sold the information to the government of Santa Clara County.
This data, along with observations from enforcement officers on the ground, was used to levy heavy fines against the church for violating COVID-19 restrictions regarding public gatherings.
“Every Sunday,” Calvary’s assistant pastor, Carson Atherly, would later testify, the officers “would serve me a notice of violation during or after church service.”
Calvary is suing the county for its use of location data, a controversial tool increasingly deployed by governments at all levels—notably in relation to the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. While enabling law enforcement to more easily identify potential offenders, the practice, called “geofencing,” has also emerged as a cutting-edge privacy issue, raising constitutional issues involving warrantless searches and, with Calvary Chapel, religious liberty.
While I am sure that the government knows where to find me on Sunday mornings no matter what I do (after all I had a DOJ computer following this blog for a number of years), you might want to shut your phone off before you leave home from now on.
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A DOJ computer? Gracious. Let us hope it was a believer looking at your site on his coffee break.
ReplyDeleteTurning the phone completely off might be a good idea. At this moment, I'm somewhat more worried about the large mosque within two miles of the church, but it is on the other side of an interstate, so I hope ugliness won't spill over in our direction.
I suspect a disciple of J. Edgar Hoover was tasked with the job of studying obscure blogs like this one. The ugliness will come given enough time. Maybe not in our time but in our children and grandchildren's.
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