“In light of news that every day the entirety of telecom giant Verizon’s call system records are handed over to the NSA, news that Occupy Wall Street protest attendees’ cellphones were logged should hardly come as a shock,” said Salon.com on June 7. “It nonetheless bears noting that cellphone metadata of march and rally participants was likely specifically logged, as security expert Steven Ramdam recently noted.
“This means that individuals were directly targeted for their engagement with First Amendment-protected activity.”
Ramdam is a security expert who gave a talk titled “Privacy Is Dead” that advocated we “get over it”. Salon.com reported he said: “I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didn’t turn their cell phone off ... the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID’d, whether an informant pointed them out, it’s known they were there anyway.
“This is routine.”