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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?
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.
Speak for yourself, Im reading this on the bus using my blackberry...damn they are going to find me now
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"...
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...
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.
Which is a glaring hole in the law, one which should be changed.
Any personally identifying information held by a company or individual about a second individual should be considered confidential and treated as such. Otherwise you might end up in the situation where your doctor doesn't tell anyone you have disease X, however your credit card company could because they know you've been buying medications. Who the information comes from is really of little consequence; it's the information itself that matters.
The smart criminals just carry a disposable cellphone, so it's a non-issue for them. Warrantless cellphone tracking just hurts everyone else.
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/
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
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.