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Cell Phones, Missing Persons, and Privacy
An anonymous reader sends in a Seattle PI story about the use of cell phone records in missing-person cases. Typically, phone companies turn over location information to police without a warrant if one of their customers is reported missing; the police need only to state that the person may be in danger. In any criminal case, a warrant from a judge would be required before the telcos divulged any information. While in some poster-child cases lives have been saved as a result of this practice, it seems like a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It is not a crime to go missing.
It's really hard to get worked up about this. If someone is missing, the police look for them. It's great that they use all of their resources. Privacy is great, but so is staying alive.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I have gone out on searches for missing people, including ones that have basically called 911 and was able to say basically "I am stuck in the snow and dieing" but they had no idea where they were. This was before most cellphones had a GPS, and our 911 center had no idea where the call came from. Calling the cell company, we had the Sheriff on the phone along with the parents of the missing kids, and the parents paid the bill, and AT&T would not release the location info. Their friend had another phone provider (MCI? I can't remember it was so long ago), and they released the last location ping to us immediately. We also were able to quickly pull the last credit card purchase from them and figured out between their gas and snack runs and their last cellphone tower used they were probably in a certain camping area. Sure enough, a airplane spotted them shortly after we re-focussed our efforts and a few hours after that the helicopters and ground teams on snowmobiles (of which I was one) reached the party of 6 and was able to pull them all back out to their families. While I am huge on privacy and a person's rights, I also was infuriated when the cell company that was used to make the 911 call for help refused to release the location information to us. I am sure they could have seen that 911 was recently dialed, and having the family members on the phone as well pleading with them to release it to us, they refused. There may be a class action suit on the way for releasing private information, but what about if they don't release it and the victims die? Does the family then sue the cell company for having life-saving information and withholding it, essentially preventing or hampering rescue efforts? Is this the same as not yielding to a fire engine responding to an emergency?
For those of you who remember this incident a couple of years ago:
http://www.news.com/2100-1028_3-6140118.html
James Kim's family was rescued because of a *single* ping received from a dying cell phone at a remote tower in Oregon.
Police perform searches that would normally be in violation of the 4th Amendment if they were looking for evidence or suspects all the time to check up on people on behalf of worried family members. This is known as a "community caretaking search," and was established as a legal basis for searches in Cady v. Dombrowski.
It's worth noting that 4th Amendment rights almost entirely enforced via evidence suppression motions in criminal trials. If you aren't on trial for a crime, then generally you have no real legal way of challenging a search.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you want REAL privacy, dig that old phone out of the drawer and pay cash for a pre-pay sim.
I'm no fan of nannying government or warrantless searches or secret warrants, but I find your position too fundamentalist for my taste; especially when your solution is so easy.
If you've been kidnapped, I believe the whole idea is to let the authorities find you.
This only becomes a problem if they start telling the telcos that Mr Xyz is missing when he isnt.
And then the lawsuit would be quite straight forward.
Mr Xyz knows that he wasnt missing and can probably back that up.
would also help find the occasional kid.
Cell phones with GPS (mandated for our benefit) could also be used to help find missing people, like those terrorists. Terrorists that speak out against the government, or a political party, or anyone claiming to be law enforcement.
Most states have laws which allow state district attorneys to sign a warrant to obtain phone or internet records. A JUDGE'S SIGNATURE IS NOT NECESSARY. There is also a federal version of this law for our attorney friends in federal offices. This whole idea that the information is legally protected is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. NO ISP OR PHONE COMPANY REQUIRES A JUDGE'S SIGNATURE TO OBTAIN RECORDS.
Any Telco/ISP that receives a DA-signed warrant will either 1. comply or 2. get owners/officers dragged into court, and into jail if they refuse to comply.
I know this because I brought such a case to the Oregon ACLU, who was very interested. So intersted that within 12 hours of my detailed e-mail, they asked their lawyers to look at it. The lawyers pointed out the Oregon and federal laws to me, and explained that other states had equivalent statutes. Game over.
The basic case was this: Somebody with a laptop lojack-type tracking software installed had their laptop stolen. The company who managed the tracking software had pinpointed it to an IP address on my network. A Portland, OR police detective then sent an affidavit signed by a Portland DA to get the identity of the user behind this IP address. I refused to give him the information, thinking that there was legal protection for my network user. The detective threatened to drag me into court and so I contacted the ACLU. The ACLU's contact page said I should wait up to 36 days to get a reply. This was around 8 PM. At 8:30 AM the next morning, the office of the director called me back with a keen interest in the case. Cool, eh?
hen, their lawyers got involved. They informed me of the multitude of laws which make this perfectly legitimate activity. This was not the answer I expected (and apparently not the answer that the Oregon ACLU director's office expected, either, because they completely lost interest.) They also told me that the threats to force us to appear in court over the matter were no joking matter.
In the end, we never heard from the customer that we outed, or at least they still pay their bill. So, it may have worked out ok for everyone. Anyways, the guys who are out there selling anyone's phone records for the asking are doing the same thing with the carriers - pretending to be district attorneys, not judges.
Is there anything in law where if the authorities go looking for a missing person, and find them, the "missing" person can state that they WANT to remain "lost" and the authorities will have to honour that??
(I mean under normal, nonthreatening conditions, not just battered women's shelters and the like, where the assumption is already that you wish to remain "lost".)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Most warrants are issued when there is no proof of criminal activity, only a realistic possibility ("probable cause") that it may be occurring. Think of it, if a crime is already proven, why waste time and money searching for more evidence?
If a person is missing without living a reasonable explanation, it's more likely than not that a crime has been committed. Most people at least leave a note or make a phone call if they run away from their spouse. Running away as a minor, from your own children or from a debt is a crime by itself. Given the massive loss of public resources otherwise, the law should probably require a signed note, without indication of new address needed, if someone just wants to be left alone.
Until then, if an adult with no outstanding obligation is found by police but does not wish to go back to his/her family, their whereabouts should not be revealed to any private citizens and their cell phone records should not be examined without a probable cause for investigating other crimes.
Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy there. There are about 6 billion shades of grey between 100% social, sharing every single moment with everyone, and 100% paranoid, affraid of everything that moves.
And even for a given person there are nuances in how much you trust them. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, either you broadcast every waking moment and detail of your life to them, or you fear them and hide from them.
E.g., I trust mom, but I wouldn't tell her my passwords. I don't "hide" from her, I don't "fear" her, and I certainly don't have any "delusions of grandeur", but it's just something that she doesn't need to know and accidentally end up telling everyone she knows. (For all her good intentions, she _is_ a terminal chatterbox and sometimes her mouth gets a whole lap ahead of her judgment.)
E.g., I trust grandma, but I wouldn't necessarily tell her each time I took a taxi to the railway station. She's seen a great depression as a child, and then a war, and still has certain... immutable ideas about money management, which would make the stereotypical Scotsman look positively spendthrift. So I'm just avoiding an unnecessary talk about how not only it's an abomination to blow a few euros on the taxi.
And from there it's even more shades of grey when it comes to who is entitled to know what. If you get far enough from there, some people don't need to know anything about me. A few people _are_ to be avoided.
And the implication is starting to somewhat bother me that, basically, if you want any privacy at all, then you're one of those guys that "live our lives in fear and have to hide from each other." It's just called being realistic enough, not being a paranoid hermit.
So let's lay that fallacy to rest already. So you have friends and talk to them. Even on the phone. Big deal. We all do. So you look out for each other. Big deal. Again, we all do. It still doesn't automatically overrule all and every privacy concerns. You don't need to be paranoid and afraid to not broadcast every moment of your life, you just need to be realistic enough.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If the state isn't acting appropriately 100% of the time, you don't have any chance of being free. Exceptional circumstances do not justify abrogating freedom.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Perhaps this should be the the impetus for a new "contract with society".
In the event that I am lost and my cell phone or GPS bracelet or other tracking devices are the only way to find and save me, I agree to just sit there and die. In exchange, I want my privacy back and do not want such records made available to nearly anyone who asks.