In the 1980's, some powerful senator's cell phone was snooped on, resulting in a major scandal when the contents of his phone calls was revealed in the press.
This resulted in Congress passing laws that made it illegal for radios to be capable of listening in on cell phone frequencies or being easily modified to allow them to do so.
It is likely that only similar widely publicized embarrassments and privacy violations of the rich and powerful will result in any meaningful legislative attempts to curtail the growth of the police state in the United State.
They clearly don't intend to do much about it unless they themselves are the victims of such abuses of power. As long as it's just "nobodies" or social or political outcasts who are the victims the police and surveillance aparatus, it's doubtful that much will change.
Your example shows why that doesn't work. The correct solution to people eavesdropping on calls is end-to-end encryption, which we still don't have for phone calls. Which means that bad people can still eavesdrop.
But meanwhile we now have a stupid law that prevents honest people from buying interesting radio hardware and makes it even less likely that we will ever have open cellphone baseband processors etc.
This resulted in Congress passing laws that made it illegal for radios to be capable of listening in on cell phone frequencies or being easily modified to allow them to do so.
It is likely that only similar widely publicized embarrassments and privacy violations of the rich and powerful will result in any meaningful legislative attempts to curtail the growth of the police state in the United State.
They clearly don't intend to do much about it unless they themselves are the victims of such abuses of power. As long as it's just "nobodies" or social or political outcasts who are the victims the police and surveillance aparatus, it's doubtful that much will change.