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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."
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?
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 don't think explicitly means what you think it means. The word you need is implicitly.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
There's a difference between "people" and law enforcement however. Case law has been shown to allow for general vicinity locating but anything more accurate requires a warrant:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/celltracking/lenihanorder.pdf
However this can vary by jurisdiction so YMMV.
Now if someone wanted to track you on their own and can do so, that's their prerogative.
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.
Erh... no. I grant people the right too reach me, as in, get in contact with me, if, and only if, I choose to answer it when they call me.
That's what I explicitly grant when carrying a cell around.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, I don't know how to achieve that goal, short of re-wiring some brains.
Carrying a cellphone isn't displaying any expectation of privacy. By having it, you're explicitly granting permission for people to find you.
I think you're explicitly granting permission for people to call you, which is not the same thing as knowing where you are. Similarly, just because my cellphone can record audio and video while "off-hook" doesn't mean that I'm explicitly granting permission for people to eavesdrop my day-to-day conversations.
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...
I already do.
I mean, hypothetically.
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"
Carrying a cellphone isn't displaying any expectation of privacy. By having it, you're explicitly granting permission for people to find you.
Actually, I am granting the right to attempt to contact me (I can lie about my location, even if I honor the request/answer) to those whom I give credentials (i.e. Cell#)
That is a far cry from explicitly allowing the whole world to know my exact location.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
But if I have the phone set to meeting/silent, my expectation is of privacy
No, your expectation is not to be disturbed. If you wanted privacy you would have turned the phone off......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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/
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
You assume that the network has the ability to determine that your phone is set to silent. I think this is a false assumption. The network just knows that your phone is connected -- it has no idea if your phone is set to ring/vibrate/silent, what ringtone you use, etc.
Furthermore, why should it matter what setting your phone is on? You either have privacy (i.e: law enforcement needs a warrant to view your location information) or you don't. Why are we even talking about the 'silent' setting, as though that should make an iota of difference in either direction?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.