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Cops' Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking Now Better Than GPS
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to discuss a proposed bill to limit location tracking of electronic devices without a warrant — what it's calling the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act, or the GPS Act. Ahead of that hearing, University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze submitted written testimony (PDF) telling Congress that phone carriers, as well as the law enforcement agencies with which they share data, can now use phones' proximity to cell towers and other sources of cellular data to track their location as precisely or even more precisely than they can with global positioning satellites. Thanks to the growing density of cell towers and the proliferation of devices like picocells and femtocells that transmit cell signals indoors, even GPS-less phones can be tracked with a high degree of precision and can offer data that GPS can't, like the location of someone inside a building or what floor they're on. With the GPS Act, Congress is considering expanding the ban on warrantless tracking of cars with GPS devices that the Supreme Court decided on in January. Blaze's testimony suggests they need to include non-GPS tracking of cell phones in that ban, a measure law enforcement agencies are strongly resisting."
The cell tower nearest my home is about 2 miles by crow, but 15 miles by car, on the other side of the reservoir. GPS is much more accurate.
...You can't have both.
From now on, I'll only make calls from stolen cell phones. Way to go gov!
We, the consumers, pay good money for the hardware in a smartphone, including the GPS geolocation capabilities. Then some government goons come along and say "Ha ha! We'll track your location using the GPS electronics in your phone!" ------- Same with Facebook. We, the users, make Facebook a great, big site with our data and our invested time. Then the government goons come along and say "Ha Ha! We'll find out everything we want about you by poaching your Facebook data!" ------ This particular decade has very much started on the wrong foot, with regards to personal privacy and somesuch. -------- How much worse can this all get? Will we be required by law to give up ALL PRIVATE DATA because the government likes to have it? -------- These laws and personal data tracking policies are just wrong.... wrong, wrong, wrong....
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
What I want is to have the same rules for everyone, with the exception that the police can get a court order for special actions (searches, tracking, wiretapping, etc.). If it's legal for a private person to secretly track someone, then the police don't need a warrant. If it's not, then the police can't do it either unless they get a warrant. Any exceptions should be explicitly created by law, such as access to DMV records and criminal databases.
If we had such a simple and straight-forward interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, then the debate wouldn't be over police powers, it would be about what anyone could do.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Every time we pass a new law we water down the constitution.
"papers" - is not strictly paper. it is where their data is stored.
"effects" - whatever they have
"houses" - where they store themselves and their stuff.
"persons" - they themselves
what more is needed?
comment directly in my journal
Unlike GPS devices covertly installed on your vehicle by police, cell phones are in the user's control. You don't have to leave it turned on all the time. In particular, if you are doing something private, like visiting your mistress, you can simply turn the phone off before driving to her apartment. And if you're afraid the phone will still leak location information while in standby or power-off mode, you can simply remove the battery.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Faraday phone holders and wallets should become popular soon :) oh wait, did I just become a tinfoilmadhatter? :D
Do you seriously think facebook stuck around because of your work and not because corporations already did the same thing and paid facebook to keep the servers on? Or do you just think that (nearly unrestricted) corporate privacy invasion is less bad than government privacy invasion?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
This seems obvious to me, but bills like this should be formulated in terms of what they actually do, regardless of the technology used.
In this case, the bill should simply state that a warrant is required when someones location is actively monitored within a certain precision for a certain time period.
Same with laws around cookies, which is a topic among lawmakers in some countries. Instead targeting cookies, these laws should address the fact that a user is uniquely identified across sessions and/or websites. Cookies are just one way to achieve this, but there are others which do not even require cookies, such IP number in combination with all sorts of data such as browser agent, os, screen resolution etc. etc. that makes any user pretty much unique even without cookies.
My karma ran over your dogma
Wait wait wait, you're trying to tell me that the congress is actually planning to pass a law that doesn't fly in the face of the constitution and actually reinforces the 4th amendment?
My calendar says 5/18 not 4/1...
"Except that surveillance, simply having an approximate idea where you are, is not now, and never was a search." Incorrect, if you read the decision on GPS, the problem was not with knowing where people were, either very specifically, or generally, but with the amount of time that knowledge was available. The previous decision makes it quite clear that even a general knowledge, over anything other than an incidental period of time, is a violation.
One solution to being illegally tracked like this is to remove the battery if you are wanting to remain private.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's why I turn my cell phone off when I'm not actually on a call. And I'm thinking of removing the battery, too.
> University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze...
"Awww, come on, ma! Couldn't you have named me 'Max Blaze'? Then I could have been a secret agent. Now I have to be a university professor >:-( "
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If the government can do so without a warrant, then any citizen should have the same power. Just put up a web site with the 24/7 locations of all of the law makers and see how long until this gets passed.
When E911 was mandated and everyone had to be able to provide the position of a phone calling 911 to the emergency services, the original solution was that every phone was going to have to have a GPS in it. A lot of them do (and did) have a GPS chip, even ones that don't let you get access to the positioning information. But many providers didn't want to pay for that chip until the user was really going to be doing something with it that they would somehow get paid for so they went another way: with Differential Time Of Arrival, or DTOA. GPS frequently doesn't work when you are in a building but DTOA doesn't care about a few walls as long as it has signal because they don't slow the signal down much compared to the time it spends passing through air.
The nifty thing about DTOA from a technological standpoint is that cell sites tend to have sectored antennas, so you only need two of them to triangulate a target, and even one site is going to significantly restrict your search area, to a relatively small arc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd like to know which police departments are doing this and to what degree (at least let's see the budget and expense reports for it?) I have a hard time believing the ordinary police department could afford to implement and utilize this technology on a regular basis against regular citizens for regular crimes. It'd probably be something that turns up in the course of an investigation anyways, perhaps to establish alibi's or corroborate a detective's theories about the crime. Actively usin this shit around the clock for god knows what? Give me a break, I just don't see it being likely. I mean let's just keep this in perspective here. You aren't being tracked for your dimebag dope deal, oK?
I'm fairly sure I've seen phones with GPS chips where you could choose whether or not to use "assisted GPS". If you turn off your cell radio and turn off assisted GPS, then all GPS should work as you describe.
There are exceptions in the act for almost everything, 2604 is perhaps the most comprehensive. They should fight it only because it creates a lot of paper work.
Sec. 2604. Emergency situation exception
(a) Emergency Situation Exception- Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, any investigative or law enforcement officer, specially designated by the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate Attorney General, or by the principal prosecuting attorney of any State or subdivision thereof acting pursuant to a statute of that State, may intercept geolocation information if--
(1) such officer reasonably determines that an emergency situation exists that--
(A) involves--
(i) immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person;
(ii) conspiratorial activities threatening the national security interest; or
(iii) conspiratorial activities characteristic of organized crime; and
(B) requires geolocation information be intercepted before an order authorizing such interception can, with due diligence, be obtained;
(2) there are grounds upon which an order could be entered to authorize such interception; and
(3) an application for an order approving such interception is made within 48 hours after the interception has occurred or begins to occur.
Batman caught the Joker with cellphone sonar, not the Riddler.