Quote from: howardkarmel on August 30, 2012, 10:08 am    LOCATION TAPS are very accurate, using GPS-pings and cell-tower triangulation; LEO will see your location down to a few meters. These taps are described by law-enforcement insiders as "routine." For instance, in murder cases, it's standard procedure to contact cell phone companies to get a list of all persons in the area during the time of death. In any kind of criminal investigation, these taps are regularly used to track the suspects' known list of associates; "It is common in location orders for the government to seek the location of the community of interest- that is, the location of the persons with whom the target communicates." - (Telecom Lawyer Al Gidari, House Judiciary Committee Hearing, May 2010).      The platforms LEO uses with these Location-taps are robust. In some cases, it can take as little as a few hours for tap-requests to be processed by cell phone companies and sent back to the police. Google even created an add-on to Google Earth for a foreign government's law enforcement, where typing in any phone number would bring up that device's pin-pointed location. Whether or not something so blatantly "Big Brother" is currently in use here in America is unknown. Even still, the sheer volume of these location-taps is overwhelming; Sprint alone had over 8 million requests in '11. The answer to whether "Big Brother" techniques are used in America is yes, depending on the circumstances. Security information can be confirmed in the most unexpected ways, as this video shows:Jay Leno on Top Gearhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0XtNGuijqcThe first part of the interview (after reading out the list of cars) reveals some very interesting stuff on what the Secret Service have access to when protecting the President.The rest of the interview is just entertaining.