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

Too easy to spoof

[ultraexactzz]

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?

It is worth saying again

[Normal_Deviate]

Privacy is doomed. The march of technology can be slowed, but not stopped. Eventually this will give us a world without theft. The trick is keep it from also giving us a world without fun. That means getting rid of most of our laws, not just nibbling around the edges trying to make it hard to enforce them.

No, I don't know how to achieve that goal, short of re-wiring some brains.

Why stop at law enforcement?

[Virtucon]

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.