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.'"

Comments

It's less than 300 yards

[Yonder Way]

It's a lot closer than that. I used to work for one of the companies that designed this technology.

Re:It's less than 300 yards

[dl748]

Actually, this is wrong. At one time, I had to talk with upper 911 officials about GPS software. They can only get less than 300 yards if they are in a BIG city, hence more towers to use for triangulation. This fails as you move to say, a rural area (aka driving in the country) or even driving on a major highway going from city to city. In most cases they can't even do triangulation, worst case they can get 1-2 strips of area that could be up to 10 miles in area, less worse, they only get 2 points which are up to 10 miles apart. Lets not even mention if you go into a tunnel, or even a big building, where signal strength drops, or reflects off of objects, and the towers think you are somewhere else. These guys also told me, that if i really knew how 911 work, i'd be suprised that they could find anyone, even calling from a stationary phone. The frequency of dialing 911, and getting a dispatcher in a completely different county, that has no idea of the area, is astounding. You run into similar problems with GPS phones where you use satelittes, going into a building with metal roof, putting your phone in your car, if your car rolls over, you are screwed on GPS.

Re:It's less than 300 yards

[Yonder Way]

Big cities actually make it harder to triangulate. Not only is it harder to get a GPS fix in a skyscraper canyon (if your phone uses GPS), it does weird things to RF as well (causing bounces).

Suburbia is a lot easier to deal with than a big city.

Re:It's less than 300 yards

[jafiwam]

You are mixing two different types of areas there.

The land-line mixups are poor implementation or upkeep of the database (think reverse DNS) that the phone switch operators are supposed to be keeping.

Some tech somewhere needs to understand the phone routing and add the entries into the database. When a phone number is moved, it doesn't always get updated. Likewise, the geographic data used to determine the center called based on the location isn't always accurate.

That's above and beyond the general PIA of databases in the first place.

My part-time ISP employer is going through this as it tries to become a CLEC to cut dial-up line costs, so I have learned some of this firsthand. You ALWAYS need to tell dispatch WHERE you are first, clearly and as accurately as you can. Don't depend on them knowing where you are.

As a rule of thumb...

[Chris Bradshaw]

Below is a link to more info on which phones allow you to turn these features off, etc...

http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/cell_phones/

As a general rule, I always turn off the location settings on my phone. Sprint has had this feature enabled by default for the past 3 years, and it wasn't until recently that I learned I was broadcasting my whereabouts 24x7.

Re:As a rule of thumb...

[spacefight]

While you can turn this feature off, the cell phone providers can till track you as they own and control the network.

Re:As a rule of thumb...

[matthew.thompson]

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.

Patriot Act

[headkase]

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.

Re:Patriot Act

[damian cosmas]

And I'll change some more words and see if the new sentence makes any sense.

What exactly is the problem with allowing herrings to run for election with simple knowladge[sic] of how to solve quadratic equations. It's only the same standard required before they get a pilots hat, and still a few steps short of your oh-so-precisely-defined canard.

I can change words (and spell them correctly!), too, so what's your point?

Re:Patriot Act

[Curunir_wolf]

Yea, I mean, WTF is up with this?

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.

What have the other judges been doing? They just allow this kind of tracking for no reason, or what?

Cop: "Judge, we want to track these guys by their cell phone."
Judge: "Oh, have they committed a crime?"
Cop: "Well, no, not that I'm aware of."
Judge: "Ah. But you think they're going to commit a crime?"
Cop: "Um. Well, it's possible. But, no real reason to think so, no."
Judge: "Uh-huh. And you want to track their movements because... ??"
Cop: "Well, look, they just seem odd, that's all. They seem, you know, suspicious"
Judge: "Ohhh... Why didn't you say so. Ok, here, I'll sign it"

?!?!?!

Re:Criminals are tracked?

[ZeroExistenZ]

In Belgium, they recently sent a SMS to all people wich a cellphone within a certain range to investigatigate a crime which happened at a gasstation, searching for witnesses. (which also raised alot of privacy questions.)

So even not just criminals I suspect, but just needing a motivation to get the data from the providers, which do have these access logs. I don't know the exact protocol used in GSMs, but when you turn on your phone it tries to connect to your provider. And tries to keeps that 'connention'. (fe. if you have roaming, and you cross the border, you get welcomed with an SMS from the new network you're connected to.)

Do phone companies save that info?

[geoffrobinson]

That info could also clear you of a crime.

Re:Do phone companies save that info?

[Pembers]

True. Bear in mind that this kind of system proves where your phone was - not necessarily where you were.

I know of at least one case where positioning information from a mobile has helped to clear someone, that of Damilola Taylor. Four youngsters were accused of murdering an 11-year-old boy. A mobile belonging to one of the defendants was used two miles from the scene of the crime, seven minutes beforehand, and it seemed there was no way he could have covered the distance quickly enough. (It later transpired that there was a shortcut that the prosecution didn't know about or didn't consider.)

The main reason the defendants were cleared was actually that a key prosecution witness was found to have lied about something. The judge decided that her testimony was unreliable and ordered the jury to acquit two of the defendants. They later found the other two not guilty.

Re:Criminals are tracked?

[exiant]

300 yards...take into account that's THREE football fields.

In a city like Chicago, that's a lot of ground to cover.

We Need to Expand the Patriot Act, Then

[Prototerm]

We can't have people's civil rights get in the way of law enforcement. We need to change the law to keep the courts out of this. The courts have no right getting involved in these matters.

*That'll* fix those Satanic, Evolution-loving, Commie Terrorists!

(/tongue in cheek)

There, I believe I've insulted enough Conservatives for one day. I'll go now.

Re:Shock!

[ScrewMaster]

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."

OMG I feel so much safer now...

[Chaffar]

"In recent years, law enforcement officials have turned to cellular technology as a tool for easily and secretly monitoring the movements of suspects as they occur. But this kind of surveillance - which investigators have been able to conduct with easily obtained court orders - has now come under tougher legal scrutiny."

In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information

So if I got this right, in recent years our rights were outright ignored, all this while in the name of the fight against terror even more legislation hindering our rights were regularly called for. And now I'm supposed to feel better because of THREE recents cases where judges actually did their jobs? Dunno, I don't have A.D.D, I'm lucid enough to see a situation of "three steps back, one step forward" when I see one.

Re:OMG I feel so much safer now...

[mpe]

So if I got this right, in recent years our rights were outright ignored, all this while in the name of the fight against terror even more legislation hindering our rights were regularly called for.

With there being little to no evidence that this increase in legislation will actually do anything to make terrorism less likely. Maybe rights hindering legislation isn't the best way to address the issue in the first place, even if it is maybe it isn't the general public who should be having their rights hindered.

And now I'm supposed to feel better because of THREE recents cases where judges actually did their jobs?

Together with an unknown number of cases where judges didn't. Together with the problem that judges generally arn't those holding people in custody in the first place.

What would Elmer say?

[DumbSwede]

When I see "Cell Phone Tracking" I can't help but think of Elmer Fud saying, "Be wery wery quite. I'm tracking cell phones. He, he, he"

What's being tracked...

[reddish]

'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.

Re:Criminals are tracked?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not too ambiguous

[unknownideal]

"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.

Re:Not too ambiguous

[jacksonj04]

You can't remotely enable a phone's microphone using standard GSM. The phone would need to have a specific command code to remotely enable the microphone, and there is no concievable value in such a feature.

Basically (The following is for UK, ymmv), when you ring someone your phone negotiates with the network, establishes a voice channel to dial the number and *then* turns on your microphone so background noises don't interfere with dialing tones. When people ring you, your phone may turn the microphone on if you have voice answering (For example, you just say "answer" on a handsfree without needing to push anything) but it won't establish a voice channel until it actively picks up the call.

Search warrants?

[aussie_a]

Shouldn't they need a search warrant (that requires probable cause) to get any of my information from the phone company? It mentions a warrant of some kind was needed. Shouldn't probable cause be required for all warrants? Want to search my home? The police need probable cause. Want to search my bank records, I'd like to hope you need probable cause. Want to find out who I've rung up? I hope you need probable cause. Want to follow me, I'd hope you need probable cause.

If I'm on an investigation and I need to know where somebody is located who might be committing a crime, or, worse, might have a hostage, real-time knowledge of where this person is could be a matter of life or death."

Let's pretend he doesn't have a phone. Don't you need probable cause to search through his belongings (home/work-place/car)? Tough luck mate. But you can't just screw people over in the name of national security. Well, at least you couldn't.....

corroborating their whereabouts with witness accounts

Well get probable cause. Sheeesh. Or ask the person to give the police permission to look at his phone record location.

or helping build a case for a wiretap on the phone

Wait, you want to be able to access someone's phone records willy-nilly, so you can build up a case to access their phone records even more? Am I the only one to think this is crazy?

And the government is not required to report publicly when it makes such requests.

Now that's scary. I can understand them wanting to keep it quiet at the time it's happening, but come on. A week, or at most a month, should be sufficient time to no longer be crucial, especially if you're using it to obtain a hostage or arrest them. The only reason to keep it secret indefinitely is so you can to pull the wool over people's eyes as you widdle away their civil liberties.

Prosecutors, while acknowledging that they have to get a court order before obtaining real-time cell-site data, argue that the relevant standard is found in a 1994 amendment to the 1986 Stored Communications Act, a law that governs some aspects of cellphone surveillance.

That's a joke. How could the congressmen in 1986 have any idea what sort of application and usage cell-phones would have 10 years in the future? They probably gave wide-powers to the police, because at the time, it wasn't possible (and perhaps not even thinkable) for them to use those powers. You can't blame them for not forseeing the future, and to claim they did and that the law should still be used is ridiculous. That's like claiming the right to bear arms in the constitution gives every citizen the right to have nuclear weapons. There was no way nuclear weapons were invisaged when America was formed.

The standard calls for the government to show "specific and articulable facts" that demonstrate that the records sought are "relevant and material to an ongoing investigation" - a standard lower than the probable-cause hurdle.

The language is very telling. "Oh it's just a necessity in our way. We don't need to worry about that." I believe perhaps the standard should be raised, especially with an opinion like that.

Prosecutors in the recent cases also unsuccessfully argued that the expanded police powers under the USA Patriot Act could be read as allowing cellphone tracking under a standard lower than probable cause.

God bless us. Every one. (Thankfully they have been unsuccessful, although is that 100% of the time? I don't think so.)

In the digital era, what's on the envelope and what's inside of it, "have absolutely blurred," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group.

And so the prosecution predictably wants it to be treated as if it were all on the envelope.

And that makes it harder for courts to determine whether a certain digital surveillance method invokes Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Re:Search warrants?

[sabNetwork]

Case law provides numerous specific allowance criteria for probable cause:

http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/315/315lect06.htm

E911

[Savage-Rabbit]

As a general rule, I always turn off the location settings on my phone.

That will help but it won't solve the problem even if you manage to turn out any kind of E911 related GPS system (I am assuming that is what you are talking about) that may be built into your mobile phone. The thing is that every time that you use the phone your service provider can still track your location since they know which GSM cell you are in and they can even roughly position you within the cell without ever retrieving any location data from your phone. This is done by using data retrieved from the GSM trancievers in each cell which allows your sevice provider or anybody they are cooperating with to approximately calculate your location. They can even trigger interactions with your phone to discover your location without you ever using it, of course this only works if you keep it switched on all the time. Then of course there are military systems used for tracking GSM phones (among other things) which are much more powerful.

Big Brother law coming to Europe next week...

[pieterh]

The European Commission and Parliament have done a deal which looks set to introduce a law that makes this kind of tracking a daily part of police work.

The "Data Retention Directive" proposes tracking all mobile phone and Internet usage, and storing this for 2 years, and (worst) making it available to police and other parties (possibly commercial ones), without much regard to existing privacy laws.

There is an FFII press release on this subject: http://wiki.ffii.de/DataRetPr051205En.

The FFII and EDRI are fighting this in the Parliament, but the directive has been shoved through very brutally by the Council, led by the UK. Basically the bureaucrats of the Commission, unhindered by any European Constitution, are creating laws by stealth, and this Big Brother directive is symptomatic of a take over of the national legislative processes by an group of unelected, unaccountable officials.

The UK Presidency had proposed a very brutal law, which went as far as requiring the logging of the MAC address of every computer connected to the Internet (yes, that blew me away too), and using the Good Cop/ Bad Cop approach, bullied the Parliament into accepting a "compromise" agreement that dropped all the references to terrorism, and added a bunch of waffle about human rights, but basically creates a pan-European database of every cellphone call, and every Internet communication. I've not yet had time to see whether TCP/IP end-points are also logged, but the original proposals definitely requested this.

Europe is rapidly turning into a police state that makes the US look like a haven of freedom and civil rights. The rejection of the European Constitution by the French and Dutch voters, though a nicely symbolic act, have left a power vacuum into which the grey bureaucrats of the Commission have stepped.

Ok, but what about getting info from other sources

[King_TJ]

What I'm thinking of here are all of the businesses that make use of cellphone GPS tracking as part of their normal operation. (EG. Most courier services in my area issue drivers Nextel 2-way radio/phones and track their location constantly via the phone's GPS system. The results are dumped into some routing software that dispatch uses to figure out who is closest to a customer calling in to have a delivery picked up.)

Even if legislation is written up that specifically prevents govt. and police from obtaining this type of info from the *cellular companies* without a warrant, would the same apply if they wanted it from a private business?

Its not just cellular phones

[zappepcs]

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.

Get priorities right.

[TheLink]

People should stop focusing on the _last_ things keeping them from becoming a police state, and start focusing on the _first_ things.

Starting with very dubious electronic voting machines and who you vote as leaders.

Once you get too many of the wrong people in power, they can change all that stuff very quickly. Look at the Patriot Act, and all the recent crappy laws with dangerous long term consequences.

If citizens keep sticking their heads in the sand (or erm troughs of junk food?), the leaders can basically do what they want with impunity.

Even if you don't allow tracking now, Mr Evil Dictator can always turn it back on, once he's in power.

So the main thing is to never allow Mr Evil Dictator a chance to get power in the first place.

It is quite scary and sad that history has proven that many people will actually be willing to listen to some evil person and give him the power. These people will willingly kill anybody - even their relatives or parents/children just because "it's their job" or the supreme leader told them to.

More Like 300 Inches

[RedLion]

300 yards? I'm one of the guys that sets up and tweaks the E911 Wireless Location System for Cingular & T-Mobile. I can tell you for a fact that once I get the network properly honed, the system will determine the lat/long to within about 300 inches of the 911 caller's handset.

If only CTU used this technology!

[Greg@UF]

Then Jack Bauer would be featuring in "4" instead of "24".

Man, the technobabble in that show annoys me !