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Cellphones Increasingly Used As Evidence In Court
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the case of Mikhail Mallayev, who was convicted in March of murder after data from his cellphone disproved his alibi, highlights the surge in law enforcement's use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements. But cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Investigators seeking warrants must provide a judge with probable cause that a crime has been committed, but investigators often obtain cell-tracking records under lower standards of judicial review — through subpoenas, which are granted routinely, or through an intermediate type of court order based on an argument that the information requested would be relevant to an investigation. 'Cell phone providers store an increasing amount of sensitive data about where you are and when, based on which cell towers your phone uses when making a call. Until now, the government has routinely seized these records without search warrants,' said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. Last year the Federal District Court in Pittsburgh ruled that a search warrant is required even for historical phone location records, but the Justice Department has appealed the ruling. 'The cost of carrying a cellphone should not include the loss of one's personal privacy,' said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the ACLU."
Carrying a cellphone isn't displaying any expectation of privacy. By having it, you're explicitly granting permission for people to find you.
John
Now that we are aware of the increasing use by law enforcement of cell phone records, won't criminal simply setup their cell phones at some alibi spot, go off and commit the crime and use the records as support for that alibi?
Yes, the next time I'm going to commit murder I'm going to bring my own GPS-tracker with me.
Looks like there are only 2 real choices here:
1. Don't use or carry cellphone
2. Don't break any laws
Was there anything I missed?
It's a simple matter to avoid this sort of scrutiny. Give the cell phone in your name to someone else, go commit the crime, and then retrieve the phone. If you can't keep yourself from texting for 20 minutes, then you really have no business being a felon.
I find this reminiscent of the RIAA's arguments, where they show that infringement took place from an IP, but they cannot show who was sitting at the computer. Who can prove who was carrying a cell phone?
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
How does the prosecution prove that the cellphone was in possession of the accused at the time?
My wife frequently borrows my phone if she needs to go out and hers is dead. I'll do the same with hers. Its a portable device, with no onboard biometrics. Anyone could pick it up and transport it somewhere without the owner's knowledge or permission. What better way to frame someone for a crime than to take their phone to the scene, do the crime, call the phone (to generate a calling record with cell-tower location data) then return it.
I was on a jury for a federal case in February. The prosecutors spent a whole lot of time talking about cell phone records and showing who called who when and on what tower. To me it didn't really prove anything, because you just don't know who had possession of the phone when the calls were made.
I don't see why we on slashdot care about this with the majority of us spending all of our times in one solitary location in front of a desktop PC.
Always use throw away cell phones, when committing crimes.
Your cell phone service provider is not bound by any confidentiality laws. If they're willing to hand over your records for just a subpoena, or even for a simple request, it's within their rights. Your expectation of privacy doesn't apply to information that you provide a third party unless it's a doctor, lawyer, or spouse.
No, I don't know how to achieve that goal, short of re-wiring some brains.
So all I have to do is leave my cellphone home and I can go commit crimes? What is the world coming too?
Wy do I have the feeling this is used like Lie Detector tests?
If a polygraph test indicates guilt, then the prosecution will use all means to get it admissible. However, if it indicates innocence, it will be "brushed over"...
Think about finger prints. While CSI isn't real life, it is unnervingly close. "His fingerprints are on the gun, he must be the killer." The finger prints indicate he had touched the gun, not when, but the media is teaching us to not question this. (Much like COPS and other related shows are getting us used to having SWAT come out to take care of everything.)
If you question these things, you must have something to hide, and you don't have anything to hide, do you citizen?
You could also clone their phone before the crime. Then you only have to jam their original phone.
Anyway, people have been convicted and executed on shakier evidence than phone records. All the prosecutor has to do is convince the jury that you had the phone on you, and you'll be convicted. Remember, the DA just has to convince, he doesn't have to prove.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Cellphone traffic data has to be stored for 6-24 months in the EU, exactly for this reason. It's useful for law enforcement. The Dutch Parliament yesterday accepted a law that requires this data to be stored for 12 months (who called who, where). Internet data (who used what IP-adress at what moment, who mailed who, but not what websites were visited, gmail, twitter etc.) will only need to be stored for 6 months.
Use Adsense for Charity
this article reminds of of a movie i recently watched: a woman calls the russian embassy from her mobile phone and her first words are: "Are we on a secure line?" but it was kind of disturbing being the only one in the cinema laughing about that...
On the other hand, if you phone is stolen, the phone company will go mute. No amount of convincing will get the location information out of them. There have been cases where people were kidnapped, but the telco wouldn't give the police location information for the phone.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Why stop at law enforcement? Let all litigants in civil cases have access to the information. Think
about it. Cheating spouses, monitoring your kids; it'll be a great society if we all have this data. Ala "South Park" WifeTracker 2010 will be a great boon to all those paranoid husbands out there who's wives are meeting guys on Craigslist or PlentyofFish. At the same time why not have the tracking information go right to Twitter so we can all automatically know when Ernie down the hall takes a BM in the company lavatory.
Why stop there? Why not allow public access to all the surveillance cameras everywhere. We should have
access to all of this. Put it on youboob so we can all see it and eat popcorn at the same time.
Oh wait, let's also get your DNA so that every place you've ever been can be tracked. You know, that hair you leave behind in the tub at Travelodge? Hell, we can associate that to your tracking so we don't need electronic surveillance.
Yeah, that'll be a country that I want to live in and be a part of.
Personally, I find these trends very disheartening and with the ever increasing use of this information
being collected for profit and presumed "law enforcement" makes me worry about our future liberties. All law enforcement needs to do is have a presumption that a crime is being committed and your liberties and privacy go out the window.
Take a look at Iran, yeah I said it, and how they're using the technology to crack down on protesters in their country.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Just get an accomplice to carry your phone to a different location and make a call while you are committing a crime else where and you have an alibi. Prosecutors need to realize that this is a double edged sword, by using this method to prosecute people, the smarter criminals can use this to their advantage to give themselves alibis by having people make calls for them on their phone.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
If you aren't doing anything wrong what do you have to be concerned about?
The smart criminals just carry a disposable cellphone, so it's a non-issue for them. Warrantless cellphone tracking just hurts everyone else.
Every Trekkie knows you take off your communicator before you disobey orders and go whack a Romulan!
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Investigator: We traced your mobile phone signal to the location of the murder. Can you explain that?
Suspect: My phone was stolen not long before the incident, actually. I was making a call in the town, which probably also comes up on the log you have, when a guy snapped it from my hands. I hadn't reported it yet. Say, you don't think this mugger would have also tried to harm someone else to get their belongings, do you? I mean, someone less pansy than me who might have put up a fight?
What a pile of useless garbage this scheme is.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The question is: why do the cell companies retain such information? If the bill is paid, then the knowledge of what cell tower was nearest to me when I made the call, and other similar matters, becomes totally indefensible. Why do they still retain such useless data?
I suppose it's because they can. Storage is cheap, and only a few extra lines of code will do the job.
Another example is the public library. They usually retain a list of all books that a patron has withdrawn. But why? What purpose does it serve? They don't sell targeted advertising or offer recommendations based upon a patron's reading history. When a book is returned, all record of that transaction should be immediately deleted simply because it no longer serves any purpose.
If these companies would throw away all such useless information about their patrons and clients, then privacy concerns would become very much smaller.
However mobile phones are merely "technology", not people. So the ability to track them is a much easier sell - especially as it wouldn't involve the people at all, just some computers 'n' stuff.It seems to me that all a government has to do is make tha carrying of a mobile phone an obligation for citizens, visitors and the like. Getting rid of anonymous phones would also be part of the deal, but in many places they're already gone or on the way out.
What happens next is that people have been issued with de-facto ID cards. Ones that can be accessed passively without the owner's knowledge or permission. Yes you could turn it off, but people are so addicted to them, and so afraid of missing "that" call (we know this: almost everyone will stop doing *anything* to answer a call when the phone rings - they just can't ignore it or let it ring). amd so insecure, that hardly anyone would. It might even become socially unacceptable - like smoking in public, or travelling naked. Even better, the cost to the government is much lower than for an ID card scheme, and once everyone has one, all the time, they can be used for issuing summones, texting out tax demands, traffic tickets and almost anything else that a government or official body would need to send to it's citizens.
Presumably the next step would be to have them implanted at birth?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The lesson here is to hide your phone behind a book at the library before you go off on a crime spree, then fetch it upon completion.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
And I hope your cell phone has a web browser because you'll be making many a query to findlaw to try and figure out if what you want to do is legal. And if you can't figure it out, you better not do it, rather than, I want to do it, and though someone somewhere may take issue with it if they knew I was doing it, I'm in private and only practically have to consider the opinions of those present.
...
Bottom line ... whenever I murder someone these days I make sure to leave my phone at home. I really don't want that thing going off and disturb me at the critical point any way. Us murderers must be ultra careful these day. Whatever happened to our civil liberties? It is no fun murdering people anymore, always having to look over your shoulder... bloody police state!
People don't get convicted because their cell phone was or wasn't in one location or another, they get convicted because they have no plausible explanation for why their cell phone was in a location that fits in perfectly with the story the prosecution is telling and contradicts the story the defense is telling.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I work for a cell phone carrier. We are able to, and are asked to do so with regularity, triangulate the position of a cell phone based on signal strength to multiple towers. We do NOT require a warrant, subpoena or anything of the sort. What we have is a Microsoft Word document, sitting on a fileshare accessible to ?all? employees, containing a list of law enforcement districts and passwords. Every city/county/agency has an authorized contact person with a unique password. So Mr. 'Claims-to-be' Smith from the city of Ispyu calls up and says I want to know where this person is right now, my password is abc123, and they're told where the phone is at.
The article tells me this isn't unique to my company and is widespread across the cell phone industry. The article DIDN'T speak of the lol authentication mechanism though, so now you know.
In related news, Apple announced the next iPhone model will have a self destruct mode.
Ok, common courtesy is a good thing - most of the time, but courteous drivers piss me off.
I absolutely hate it when attempting to pull out across two lanes of traffic when a 'courteous driver' in one of those lanes stops to let me go when they have the right of way to just proceed. This creates all sorts of havoc including:
...
And then have a 'Bureau of Public Conscience' that randomly looks at whatever is visible through the camera eye, and places random calls with helpful public service messages like 'Big Brother is Watching You.'
...
Its not a 100% guilty type of thing but its human nature, You might leave the house without your cellphone, or trade with your wife but I think its pretty safe to say almost all people never leave the house, even the car without their cell phone. If you say "i didnt have my phone with me at the time" then you need to come up with who did have your phone.. who will vouch for you and take a chance at being a suspect?
I'd bet even if they do, they wouldn't tell you. After all, this way they can sell you a new one and maybe even extend their ownership, of your phone number, for yet another three years ...
Don't most good criminals use disposable pay-as-you-go phones?
If you're going to commit a crime, leave the cell phone at home, or better yet, "forget it" in your alibi's car for that time period.
"Oh I was with so and so - check the cell phone records".
Once again, only the dumb criminals get caught.
Or ... "Where were you on the night of? " ... get's cellphone record, cellphone shows you were 20 miles from moes, on the other side of the bridge. Get bridge video camera footage. There's your car and a dude who looks for all the world like you, driving when your phone handed off between sides of the bridge. ... "so you said you saw Bob at Moe's drinking on the night of."
"I was at moes having a beer."
"yeah"
"We've got proof he wasn't there. want to reconsider?"
"Can you offer immunity?"
When my cell phone was stolen as part of a neighborhood-wide crime spree, I contacted the police about using my phone, with my full permission and cooperation, to help track the criminal. Whenever I called my phone, the thief (or someone who did business with the thief) was answering. And yet the police declined to take me up on my offer, and never did recover my phone. If my privacy is (potentially) being compromised by how trackable my phone is, where's that "benefit to society" I keep hearing about?
That's exactly what I was thinking. So his phone was somewhere, woohoo. Convict the phone.
...but I think its pretty safe to say almost all people never leave the house, even the car without their cell phone.
Are you kidding me? I've left my cell phone -- intentionally or otherwise -- at home, at work and in my car many, many, many times. Assuming that someone must be lying because they said they didn't have their cell phone with them at the time is quite a stretch, IMHO. The weight of the cell phone data as evidence would have to depend upon the circumstances.
For example, I would not be overly impressed with the argument that your cellphone data suggested that your phone was in your own house when ${RandomFamilyMember} was murdered, since it seems perfectly reasonable to me that you could conceivably have left the phone at home that day -- especially if the phone did not move for a reasonably long time before or after the murder. I would expect any half-way competent attorney could poke all kinds of holes through that evidence.
OTOH, if the cell phone data says you were at the bank when it was robbed, no one can find any images that look even reasonably like you on the CCTV recordings, your clothes match what the perpetrator was wearing at the robbery AND you have no reasonable explanation for how your cell phone was at the scene of the crime when it occurred, then I'd say there's a pretty good chance that you ARE the droid we are looking for.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Investigators seeking warrants must provide a judge with probable cause that a crime has been committed, but investigators often obtain cell-tracking records under lower standards of judicial review â" through subpoenas, which are granted routinely, or through an intermediate type of court order based on an argument that the information requested would be relevant to an investigation.
It's still getting judicial review before the records are released. Therefore, a third party (the judge) must review the request before the executive branch (cops, FBI) get to demand the records. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Before the cops or FBI can investigate my property or person, yes, they need a warrant. But cell phone data? Chicken Little, anyone?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
My cellphone is untrackable, never bothers me with calls, never needs charging (it has no battery or electronics), is totally waterproof, and has no monthly fee. Try tracking that!
The part you are forgetting is that once the information is collected you have no way of knowing how long it is kept. Once you become a person of interest (suspect, political target, etc), they will be looking at historical information to see where you have been, tie it to the transaction at the bank, surveillance cams in Walmart and McD's, etc. You don't really need to have someone under full time surveillance - all the pieces are already there recorded and stored.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
... but the Justice Department has appealed the ruling.
They need a new name. Seriously. Something that more accurately reflects the current state of affairs at that particular government organ.
Not like it's really relevant, but in court I once saw a man approach the judge and set his cell-phone down in front of himself on the stand. Then while answering the questions the judge asked, he said he didn't have an address or phone number!
I've always been curious what the judge would have said had they noticed the phone sitting there in front of the guy. But I was either not a snitch, or next in line and too nervous to say anything.
"Ruthlessly pursuing the idea that the accordion is just another instrument."
Actually, this is an example of Privacy vs Policing (Law enforcement), not public safety. Police activity may be a part of public safety, but it's not the only one. Additionally, police work covers a lot of areas other than public safety. As an former journalist I quibble about the difference. One's choice of terms influences the reader's impression of what is being described, so it is important to do so with the utmost accuracy.
In my opinion the police should need warrants to track you via your cell phone, and IP addresses are personal info because at the time they are checked they identify "your" (personal) computer, not just "a" computer.....
You'd think this would be well known by now. In order for the network to know how to reach you with a call, your cellphone has to tell the tower where you are. It's just common sense, if you're getting a signal, your whereabouts can be easily determined.
The only way to protect your privacy with a cellphone is to turn it off.
In the same movie, when the woman and her goofy friend first call the spy to blackmail him, they don't *67 to hide their phone number. Too dumb to know about caller ID, are they? And the spy doesn't *69 them? The movie is intentionally full of holes, but depending on your bent it can be fun to see how many mistakes you catch.