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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.
No but it is a crime if someone has taken you against your will. They're not investigating the person missing for criminal activity but because they think that they have been victimized. Privacy is great, perspective is even better.
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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.
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The police can dispense with warrants and procedure in cases where they believe immenent harm is possible.
Also, since we're reading about this in the "Seattle PI", it's worth mentioning that suicide is illegal in the State of Washington and the phone they were tracking belonged to a suicidal young man.
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it's unlikely that the police would be able to use any unsavory information they uncovered in any sort of criminal trial. Given that, I can't really get too upset about it.
"Where is this person, we believe him to be in danger" is not "we wish to covertly monitor this person", nor is it "reveal to us this person's whereabouts for the last six months". The police *should* be able to locate people who are believed to be missing, and I'm not very worried about granting them broad powers to go about it. This is a useful task. Assuming the telco isn't enjoined to secrecy, this seems balanced to me.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to parlay powers granted that way into other, less useful acts, but... look, I'm no apologist; I think that many things they do are thoughtless, wicked, and treasonous, but they do have their uses, and in this instance? I'd need to see a case of it being abused, and I'd need it proven that existing case law wasn't sufficient to redress the abuse, before I got too excited about it.
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I thought lesson 1 was "Dump the cell phone."
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?
If the telco is required to inform the customer each time their location is provided to law enforcement (or anyone else), that will stop abuse. If I'm stuck in a ditch, a text message to the effect that my location has just been provided to assist in my rescue isn't going to upset me.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
I entirely agree. And this is the perfect example too.
To everyone else, of course, if I were missing, yeah I'd want my telco to help find me. And yes of course my safety is more important than my privacy and more important than the many many many ways in which this can be abused.
But honestly folks, when was the last time that you went missing? How many times do you risk getting kidnapped? I'm not living out in the middle of nowhere where I accidentally dangle from a cliff. And I'm not in any sort of a dangerous city. And 90% of those dangers don't provide for the time to be rescued.
So we're talking about a time when I need rescuing, and my government has the time to realize that I'm missing and then to actually find me. Come on. When does that happen?
I'll tell you when it happens. It happens when a friend or family member is expecting me to be somewhere, and I'm a few hours late and unreachable. That's not police asking the telco, it's pretty much my next of kin.
Now I have no problem organize a list of people, to whom I grant the power of grey skull to be given my mobile phone's location. Quite frankly, I think that's a great idea in general. But it won't be my government. It'll be my parents, my children, my wife, a few crazy-close friends, my business partners, and perhaps a really good neighbour. Oh, and my doctor and my lawyer. In other words, people who already have a key to my home, a code to my alarm, power of attorney, or some equivalent level of trust that far over-shadow my location as a point of privacy.
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").
Now I have no problem organize a list of people, to whom I grant the power of grey skull to be given my mobile phone's location. Quite frankly, I think that's a great idea in general. But it won't be my government. It'll be my parents, my children, my wife, a few crazy-close friends, my business partners, and perhaps a really good neighbour. Oh, and my doctor and my lawyer. In other words, people who already have a key to my home, a code to my alarm, power of attorney, or some equivalent level of trust that far over-shadow my location as a point of privacy.
I know! Lets ask some commonly-trusted community representative to act on behalf of all these people that could be concerned about your whereabouts. Some group that has a reasonable idea of law and procedure for these kind of things, and could be held accountable to some degree if they try and abuse said trust...... then anyone - anyone, not just those on your list - genuinely concerned for your whereabouts, could contact these representatives for help and make their case for further assistance. The telcos - having dealt with said representatives semi-regularly - would already have a relatively trusting arrangement with them, knowing already that they wouldn't generally ask if it wasn't generally necessary, with the overall setup saving time and hassles when someone has a legitimate concern for your safety.
Note then that this setup doesn't require any action or upkeep from you, in case you forget to keep your list of friends/doctors/lawyers/neighbors/good samaritians in sync with the telcos list.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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.
There is "missing", and there is "missing". I, too, have been on searches (sometimes with S&R) for missing people. But a 911 call or a child missing is a VASTLY different situation from someone who has simply "vanished" and nobody has seen them for a day or two.
As I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have been the victim of illegal search by overzealous law enforcement. And if I find out that somebody has illegally accessed or searched my phone records (or other private records), then they would get sued. Period. I would use the best lawyer I could manage to retain, and I would go for the throat.
Again, your situation was a 911 call, and you were right to be furious. But the primary matter under discussion here is VERY different.
And I can answer one of your questions above quite easily: the cell phone company is prohibited by law from disclosing those phone records. You would not get anywhere suing them for complying with the law. But you could most likely sue them for violating it by giving up your records without a warrant.
And no, in the vast majority of cases it is nothing at all like not yielding to a fire engine that is responding, because they are very seldom "911" situations. And if they are, the police CAN typically get an "emergency" warrant in under an hour. So the illegal search is STILL not justified.
I am disappearing on purpose. Have a nice day. Sincerely, Jane.
Yes, with skull mounted trackers we'd finally have the correct answer to the question "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?". You'd just whip out the offspring locater, press a few buttons, and you'd know instantly where they are.
Or at least where their skull is.
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.
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