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Judge Nixes Warrantless Cell Phone Location Data
Front page first-timer poena.dare writes
"The government sought warrantless access to 113 days of location data for a Verizon Wireless customer. On Monday, a judge refused the request (PDF), ruling that cell phone users have an expectation of privacy in location information. 'There is no meaningful Fourth Amendment distinction between content and other forms of information, the disclosure of which to the Government would be equally intrusive and reveal information society values as private,' said Judge Nicholas Garaufis. Privacy advocates in DC will be cheering as soon as they climb out from under their desks!"
May there be many more!
Yay Judge Garaufis!
[End Of Line]
AT&T was funneling network traffic directly to the Feds and walked Scot free for capitulating. Unless there are lock tight rules for suiting the s**t out of corporations that violate our privacy, a judge's "stern rebuke" means jack squat to me.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Let me explain something about D.C. They didn't crawl, they sprinted.
5 minutes after the all clear was given to get back in the buildings, everyone was heading home to "make sure the kids/pets were safe". Instead of the normal traffic mess at 4:30 p.m., it started at 2:20 p.m..
And if hurricane Irene passes anywhere this side of Bermuda, look for D.C. to be a ghost town as people "telecommute".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
+1 MCP!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Privacy advocates in DC will be cheering as soon as they climb out from under their desks!"
in DC... under their desks...
WHY would you rile privacy advocates by going and posting their locations?
this is the first time in a while that I cheered for a judge. They can really suprise you sometimes
a geniuine outbreak of commonsense! Just because it's digital bits doesn't mean you can throw the Constitution in the trash. Bravo!
Get a warrant! Follow due process! No more excuses about it being somehow a "new" paradigm.
The implication of these facts is that cellular service providers have records of the
geographic location of almost every American at almost every time of day and night. And under
current statutes and law enforcement practices, these records can be obtained without a search
warrant and its requisite showing of probable cause.
What does this mean for ordinary Americans? That at all times, our physical movements
are being monitored and recorded, and once the Government can make a showing of less-thanprobable-
cause, it may obtain these records of our movements, study the map our lives, and learn
the many things we reveal about ourselves through our physical presence.
[opinion quotes a dissent by judge Kozinski] "The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether twentyfour ... to say that the Fourth Amendment has no
hour surveillance of any citizen of this country by means of dragnet-type law enforcement
practices violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. When requests for
cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must
develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the
comfort of their desks, we can safely say that such dragnet-type law enforcement practices are
already in use. This is precisely the wrong time
role to play in mediating the voracious appetites oflaw enforcement."
The Maynard court noted two important distinctions between the short-term surveillance
in Knotts and the prolonged surveillance at issue in Mavnard. First, the court concluded that
while the individual in Katz did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy over his location
while traveling from one place to another, the individual in Mavnard had a reasonable
expectation of privacy over the totality of his movements over the course of a month. The court
reasoned that the totality of one's movements over an extended time period is not actually
exposed to the public "because the likelihood a stranger would observe all those movements is
not just remote, it is essentially nil." Mavnard, 615 F.3d at 560. Second, the court concluded
that people have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their
movements over an extended period because an individual's privacy interests in the totality of
his movements far exceeds any privacy interest in a single public trip from one place to another.
there are circumstances in which the legal interest
being protected from government intrusion trumps any actual belief that it will remain private.
In such cases, society's recognition of a particular privacy right as important swallows the
discrete articulation of Fourth Amendment doctrine in Smith [indicating information conveyed to third parties is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment] As addressed below, the court
concludes that the "normative inquiry" envisioned in Smith is required here, and it preserves the
reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
There's been a lot of such notices recently. Are we supposed to care? Are they better now than the unpublished heathens they were before the post in question?
Seems to have picked up around the time "Unknown Lamer" showed up, though maybe that's just a coincidence.
I knew there was tracking of geolocation of cell phone locations (see the South Korea lawsuit against Apple), but I had not previously thought of using that information to track relationships between people.
So, if someone broke into my house over the weekend, and didn't leave any forensic evidence (for whatever reason), I could just have the DA subpoena the local cell carriers for the names of everyone who was within range of my house over the time period, and run down the list of suspects from there? Excellent!
Need a list of people participating in a *pfft* Free Speech Zone protest? Take pictures of the crowd, run them through your facial recognition software, correlate with cell phone tracking data, add names to the database.
For additional fun, borrow your friend's cell phone and tape it underneath a vehicle in a "high crime" area. Tada, association with criminal elements. It's too easy.
Highway workers put those little rubber hoses across lanes of traffic to measure average speed and vehicle density at various times. Why not just get the cell phone people to hand over the tracking data of that area as a secondary data source? It would have people, not vehicle types (passenger car, tractor trailer, etc.), but could be useful tracking usage by financial strata or business purpose.
Excuse me, someone's knocking on my friend's Mom's basement door...
They were requesting "warantless" something from a Judge? If you're involving the Judge, get the warrant. Or were they trying to get a warrant and the article is being stupid and trying to call it warrantless?
It gives people in power more reason to increase GPS accuracy to a finer detail :P
God spoke to me
Earlier today I made a reference to "cookie camouflage", and got a very apt response about a program which runs in background as a browser. In this case, the solution would also be software - not software that blocks, but GPS etc. software which submits camouflage (false) data. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2393464&cid=37178870 The thread identifies a legitimate attempt at camouflage strategy http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-9950126-68.html
The point is that people's tolerance level to COMPLAIN about something is much lower than their tolerance level to DO SOMETHING.
Gently reply
Gov't has been tracking cell phone locations without a warrant for years. There are quite a few cases on the books, and they represent only a tiny portion of those that are requested and denied. Check out this law review 'recent development' article from 2006, back when they were first doing this.
Privacy advocates in DC will be cheering as soon as they climb out from under their desks!
That's where their GPS says they are. In fact, that's just where they toss their phones when they want to go off the grid.
Have gnu, will travel.
Cell phones can be located even if they have no builtin GPS. You are always connected to at least one cell tower. It's enough to find your location within 100m. Not as good as GPS but probably good enough for cops to say you were in a vicinity of crimescene.
This would have ended differently, had Judge Nicholas Garaufis been a friend of Jimmy McNulty.
Keep your phone switched off until you need to make a call, off all night. You may need counseling but you will appear saner and safer for it.
That's a possible solution. The large drawback is you can't receive unexpected calls.
Answerphone on the land line as 'they' know where you live :-)
I thought we were supposed to stand in doorways for earthquakes and hide under desks for nuclear attacks...
That precedent is: "The judiciary will not always roll over and give 'law enforcement/national security actors' trolling licenses in company-held private databases."
The lesson that community learned is: "Since the courts may say 'no', we just have to stop asking permission."
There are plenty of ways to secure back-door and under-the-table access to the data they want. None of those risk the embarrassment and delay of some judge kicking over the traces and mistakenly deciding the Constitution matters. Any of this which somehow comes to public notice will be smoothed over after the fact, legitimized by retroactive fiat, or settled with selective sacrifices of low-level peons who will be painted as "acting outside of their authority" although they were acting entirely within their off-the-record orders.
Ultimately, there's nothing to see here.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
wtf is a land line? :D