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."

Comments

Re:"Right" to a private cell phone?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I don't think explicitly means what you think it means. The word you need is implicitly.

Re:"Right" to a private cell phone?

[Shakrai]

It's still going to be in contact w/ the towers and it's location will be known

Small nitpick, but the exact location is not known unless you are actively engaged in a call/data session. GSM has "location areas" set up for idle phones. When a call/SMS comes in for your phone a paging message is broadcast on every tower within that location area. The page tells your phone to connect to the network to receive the call/SMS. Until your phone responds to that page the carrier has only a vague idea of where it is. The size of the location area varies depending on population and other factors but they are generally large enough that it would be pretty hard to locate you based solely on an idle phone.

I'm not as familiar with CDMA but I believe it uses a similar concept to handle the paging of idle phones. It makes good sense when you think about it -- if the phone had to contact the network every single time you moved between towers you'd drain the battery a lot faster while in motion. In this manner it only has to contact the network when you move between location areas, which happens a lot less, thus saving battery life.