Enemy of the state: Your cell phone is now a tracking device for NSA to hunt you down

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Enemy of the state: Your cell phone is now a tracking device for NSA to hunt you down

News of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)'s covert spying activities on Americans has sent shockwaves throughout the nation, rattling what little rudiments of freedom and liberty still remain in this once great nation. But a new report by The Washington Post (WP) ventures even deeper down the rabbit hole of American police state surveillance, revealing that the NSA now possesses the power and proclivity to track your location via your cell phone, hunt you down with aerial drones, and ultimately kill you if the agency perceives you as a threat to "national security."

According to formerly-hidden information gathered by WP reporter Dana Priest, NSA officials have had the ability to track the location of individuals using mobile phone pinpointing for at least the past decade, which may not come as much of a surprise to those who have been following world events in recent years. But what may shock you is the new precedent that was set by the agency for how it uses such information following the 9/11 terrorist attacks that took place in New York City and Virginia back in 2001.

As revealed by a phone conversation that took place between a Navy SEAL and an NSA employee back in 2001 in the parking lot of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) facility, the U.S. began taking a drastic new approach in how it used cell phone tracking to pursue alleged "terrorists." Rather than simply monitor the phone conversations of suspected terrorists for the purpose of gathering intelligence, U.S. officials adopted a new policy in which the precise location of potential terrorists, as identified by tracking their cell phones, was used to hunt them down and kill them with drones.

"The collector had never before done such a thing," writes Priest about the interaction between the SEAL and the NSA collector, who was directed for the first time on that particular day to identify the location of an individual in Afghanistan by tracking his cell phone, all for the purpose of killing him. "The CIA wanted the phone as a targeting beacon to kill its owner," adds Priest, noting that NSA collectors were previously accustomed to first verifying the identities of individuals using tracked phones before taking any further action, a process that oftentimes took several days or even weeks.

But everything changed that day, and NSA quickly transformed into an aggressive spying machine that began tracking all sorts of individuals via their cell phones. Not long after this incident, according to WP, NSA assembled a new team in the basement of its headquarters called the "Geolocation Cell," or Geo Cell, which was tasked with tracking people geographically in real time. Today, this tracking system is used to target foreign nationals with drones.

Will NSA cell phone tracking technology eventually be used to target Americans?

Since the revelation that NSA officials are also collecting and tracking information on Americans, it is only logical that the massive spying agency possesses the same infrastructure and tools required to track down and kill Americans. Even though NSA is not actually doing this yet, at least not on any sort of considerable scale that we are aware of, we do know that the Obama administration, as indicated by the recent unveiling of a 16-page memo, fully intends to drone assassinate Americans of whom it disapproves.

"Among the things the government absolutely should not be doing is secretly tracking citizens in a way that would allow for their extrajudicial killing," explains a recent DailyKos.com entry about the situation. "It is time we renewed the ban on the U.S. government performing assassinations. Once that capability has been created it is far too easy to abuse."