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Police Don't Need a Warrant To Track Your Disposable Cellphone
New submitter Blindman writes "The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that it is okay for police to track your cellphone signal without a warrant. Using information about the cell tower that a prepaid cell phone was connected to, the police were able to track a suspected drug smuggler. Apparently, keeping your cellphone on is authorization for the police to know where you are. According to the ruling (PDF), '[The defendant] did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data emanating from his cell phone that showed its location.' Also, 'if a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.'"
Use of radio (or other shared infrastructure) is not equivalent to broadcasting. Cell phone communications are, by law, only allowed between the service provider tower and the subscriber handset
Which law are you referring to? The laws of physics say that using a nondirectional antenna on a transmitter means that the signal goes EVERY direction, even directly away from this "service provider tower" of which you speak. No man-made law can supercede this. Now, what the human law DOES say is that it is illegal for the manufacture and sale of receiving equipment of certain kinds that can receive the bands of frequencies used by those services, except to certain people, which is a very different thing. Guess who gets the exceptions?
This law was pushed through by the cellphone companies, simply because the ignorant people using cell phones did not understand that a WIRELESS device they were using to communicate with a distant party was using RADIO waves to do so, and that just like they used their radios to pick up AM and FM RADIO waves, other people could, of course, use THEIR radios to pick up the radio waves carrying these communications.
Today, if the cell companies tried this, I would expect an uproar that big business had the legislators in their pockers and was running roughshod over the rights of the citizen. Instead I'm seeing people here siding with those large corporations in creating an expectation of privacy where any intelligent person would know there is none.
Yes, there is some effort made, today, by the cell carriers to make listening to the conversations hard, but this is not an issue of someone listening to the conversation, it's a case of tracking the transmitter.
If you have a radio in your pocket and it is transmitting, someone else can pick up that signal and track it. Period. End of physics lession 101. If you don't want someone tracking your radio signal, don't transmit one. End of Common Sense 102. Take notes, there will be a test.