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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.'"
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.
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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.
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.)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
That info could also clear you of a crime.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
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.
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"
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'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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.