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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.
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)
'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.
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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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.