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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!
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...
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.
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
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