Philadelphia, Feb 15 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The US Justice Department wants to track the cell phone activity and they strongly feel that for this, they don’t need a warrant at all. The U.S. Department of Justice said to a federal appeals court in Philadelphia that they don’t feel they want search warrants to monitor the cell phone activity. However the government is still not seeking to keep a tab on the content of cell phone conversations bereft of a warrant.

Civil rights lawyers argued long and hard against this step and said to the court that “providing information such as dates, times and call duration, and which cell towers the calls used, would be an invasion of privacy and a violation of constitutional protections against unjustified arrest,” according to a Reuters’ report.

“When the government acquires historical cell location information, it effectively commandeers our cell phones and turns them into electronic trackers that report, without our knowledge or consent, where we have been and how long we have spent there,” said Susan Freiwald, who is a law professor at the University of San Francisco, told the court on Friday. She added that the citizens ought to be able to use their cell phones, without them creating a virtual map of their every movement and association.