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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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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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o0t!
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?
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.
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