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Legal Battles Over Cellphone Tracking
stupefaction writes "The New York Times reports on recent successful court challenges to police use of cellphone tracking information in the course of an investigation. From the article: 'In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants. [...] Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on.'"
You know, when the police don't need warrents for searches your country is called a police state. On a related note, nice to see the patriot[sic] act extended for another four years.
Shh.
300 yards...take into account that's THREE football fields.
In a city like Chicago, that's a lot of ground to cover.
They never needed absolute proof, just a probability high enough that a judge would accept it. Apparently the DoJ hasn't been able to meet even that rather lax standard. In spite of some recent bad Supreme Court decisions, it does seem like the judiciary is the only arm of government that maintains any respect for the population at large.
My father once told me, "Every time the police want a new power, you have to drag them over the coals, make them justify it to us. Otherwise they just get lazy and we all suffer for it."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is something slightly different. All networks can triangulate signals to a degree - based on the antenna array that most networks use, signal strength, location of transmitter etc they don't need the phone to support anything.
The E911 service is, I believe, an implementation of AGPS where the phone assists in tracking to get an even closer match.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
'Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on.'
They may be able to track the location of the telephone, or the SIM card,/b> but not the subscriber.
A different thing alltogether - if you think about it. This cannot be used to locate a suspect on a crime scene, only her phone.
Do they? In Houston, the crime lab basically fabricated evidence in several departments: dna, ballistics, maybe even a few others. People got up on the stand and testified about procedures that were never performed. Who knows, maybe some little girl will get raped and you'll be the only cellphone toting person in the area at the time. They'll ask you for a semen sample, and you'll give it to them knowing that you're fully innocent and have nothing to worry about, but surprise surprise, it just happens to match the semen stain they "just discovered" on the girl's skirt. It's easier to look "tough on crime" for that re-election campaign when you can just hunt for idiots instead of real criminals. And hey, when some other girl gets raped by the real criminal, they'll just say "gee, I guess crime is going up. We need a bigger budget."
It's tough being so cynical about an organization thats supposed to be protecting us, but living in Houston, I can say that they've earned every last bit of it.
"If I'm on an investigation and I need to know where somebody is located who might be committing a crime . . ."
I don't see what everyone's worried about. They just want to track anyone who might be commiting a crime.
As people have pointed out, there are good and bad reasons that location information might be used. But it applies to tons of other things too. Say you get a WiFi capable PDA or music player, the same location information is available from those networks. Your WiFi connected laptop is also trackable, as is your pager, and soon, also your new car.
There will be those that learn to foil such tracking attempts, and so, in the end, the only people that can't be tracked are the people that should be.... which again means lots of money spent for little or no value... EXCEPT that Google and others will take advantage of that and offer us services and goods for free if we listen to the location based advertising. Yes, as you drive past the McD's your cell phone will ring with an SMS messsage containing a 15 percent off coupon for a happy meal if you buy in the next 11 minutes.
That is the reason that location tracking will continue to grow... not because of the police.
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I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I would love to be able to track the location of my 15 year old daughter's cell phone. She is bipolar and chemical dependent. We can not keep an eye on her 24 hours a day and occassionally she simply disappears. Yes, we are trying to get her into a residential treatment program, but finding something that deals with her problems (dual diagnosis) and is covered by our insurance is proving difficult. If I had unlimited funds I would place her in the best place possible, but financial realities makes that impossible.
If personal tracking were possible, we would be able to find her during one of her disappearing acts and (hopefully) keep her out of danger. Binge drinking is one of the problems, and in that state she places herself in extreme danger. It's basically a race between us finding a suitable treatment program and her self-destructing.