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Police Can Obtain Cellphone Location Records Without a Warrant
mi writes: A new ruling from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found by a margin of 9-2 that law enforcement does not need to get a warrant to grab your cell phone's location records. The justices ruled that there is no expectation of privacy for your location when you're using a cell phone. This decision (PDF) was based on a case in which a man was convicted of robbery after months of location data was given to authorities by his cell phone carrier, MetroPCS. Police got the information using a court order, rather than a warrant, because there were less stringent requirements involved. One of the judges wrote: "We find no reason to conclude that cellphone users lack facts about the functions of cell towers or about telephone providers' recording cell tower usage."
Because nothing says Easy To Know Where They Are like making them look like trees, or fancy arches, or painting them dull colors so they don't look obvious.
Thank god my state has a State Constitution which says there is no excuse not to get a warrant.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No expectation of privacy when using a cellphone?
This worries me. How long before no expectation of privacy when using the internet?
When using a car? (GPS in modern cars)
When do we have an expectation of privacy anymore?
shit, you need to investigate another line of work.
Attention to detail is not your strong suit.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This should be blatantly obvious to anybody that knows anything about wireless tech.. Your phone carrier MUST know which cell tower you're near, simply because it's required to have your phone work at all.. And it's trivial to keep a log of such connections; some carriers keep it for 30 days, some for 6 months.
My guess is that they're counting on the ignorance of the average criminal to NOT know that fact, which makes the job for the police much easier...
One of the judges wrote: "We find no reason to conclude that cellphone users lack facts about the functions of cell towers or about telephone providers' recording cell tower usage."
Seriously? We still have problems with heroin junkies not knowing the risks of sharing needles and teens not knowing about the spread of HIV. I'm not justifying ignorance but our society needs to recognize that inequalities in our educational system have resulted in some dull tools in the shed with more rusting everyday. The mantra that "Ignorance is not an excuse" is not accepted by a large percentage of Americans. Disagree? Keep watching our cities burn.
prior art.
Warrantless location tracking is just part of the equation. Monitoring will continue until morale improves. The government classifies volumes of information to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing. They use secret tools like stingrays to gather secret evidence which they attempt to present in secret, sealed and off the record. And in the event that an "activist judge" calls them on it, they withdraw the evidence so as not to have it revealed, and then re-file charges a month later to go shopping for a different judge.
In March we found out the police lock people up in secret detention facilities in Chicago, in America, without booking them, no Miranda rights, no due process or access to a lawyer, such that no one but the police even knows where these people disappear to for days or weeks on end. This isn't some terrorist POW camp at Diego Garcia, this is happening right in middle America. Police are shooting and killing people weekly if not daily, acting as judge jury and executioner, often facing zero consequences. For every "Baltimore Six" who get charged with a crime, there are just as many officers who have killed citizens without penalty.
The police state isn't coming, it's here. It's only going to get worse.
The justices ruled that there is no expectation of privacy for your location when you're using a cell phone. One of the judges wrote: We find no reason to conclude that cellphone users lack facts about the functions of cell towers or about telephone providers' recording cell tower usage.
A right and well justified decision, since it's not about the privacy of the communication but about the location records, in the same way a witness can testify that a suspect was in some location - and no warrant is needed because a court can order a witness to testify.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
I know I'm going up against many years of case law here, but... the Fourth Amendment doesn't say anything about privacy. It says no searches and seizures without a warrant.
So the question is: Is it legal for MetroPCS to hand over the data, presumably in violation of their privacy policy and CPNI laws? Or did they do it because they were threatened and intimidated?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Don't ever expect any help from your carrier anyway. All your shit belongs to them. Check your contract, chances are they have your consent to do what they want.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Have gnu, will travel.
http://wiki.radioreference.com...
I very well do have a legal expectation of privacy. cell blocked (or cellular blocked) is a phrase applied to scanners and wideband receivers manufactured for sale in the US which denotes that they comply with the provisions of PL 102-556, which amended Section 302 of the Communications Act (47USC302) to prohibit manufacture, importation, or certification of scanners which could receive the frequency band allocated for analog AMPS cellular telephony, "the frequencies allocated to the domestic cellular radio telecommunications service":
824-849MHz
869-894MHz
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
The summary makes it sound like the police now can just walk in and get all the records they want with almost no restrictions. The reality is this ruling said that a warrant isn't needed but A COURT ORDER IS. The problem, and why it was appealed, is that a warrant REQUIRES the showing of probable cause, while a court order just means the judge thinks it might be useful information. But it still means a judge has to sign off on the request in an active case. Also, this ruling was in the 11th Circuit which covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, so it isn't binding elsewhere. The article says there has been a similar ruling in the 5th Circuit (Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas), but a contrary ruling in the 3rd Circuit (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania).
I would love to have my cell phone data available to me. Why should the police have access to it, and not me? Apparently, customers are the only ones who can't have it.
Under the recently passed data retention laws passed in Australia, law enforcement only needs to ask your carrier for the data and they are obliged to provide it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No, searching through the electronic contents of the device in a suspect's pocket, and obtaining the cell tower location data from the cell phone company for where a device has been, are not the same thing, and the Supreme Court decision would not apply here.
Didn't SCOTUS recently rule that a warrant was required to obtain cellphone metadata? If so, wouldn't that be relevant to this case?
This people, is why in every movie ever, Bruce Willis throws your cellphone out the car window. What a noob.
'broadcasting' in the tech sense, yes, but NOT in the usual PUBLIC SENSE. convenient that you leave that part out.
[... other stuff...]
Broadcasting can't be said to be being done in any one particular sense. It's broadcasting, PERIOD. Your cellphone, when operating in normal, customary mode, (not off, or in airplane mode, etc.,) is sending out a radio signal identifying itself to cell towers; without cellphones doing this, the cellular telephone system wouldn't work.
While I won't bother getting in the middle of the rest of the dispute, you're making a technical argument about a legal, non-technical distinction. I can see how you'd make that mistake, because the context also makes some technical claims. But let's be clear: in legal terms, "broadcast" (sending data over radio waves) is not the same as "broadcast" (making content available to an audience). Writing an email on the bus doesn't give the riders permission to read its contents, just as downloading a song does not constitute a public performance.
This is an important distinction.
The most ignored and by far the most important amendment, the ninth, was crafted specifically to counteract the notion that people didn't have any rights other than those that are carefully spelled out in the other amendments.
It's completely in accordance with Smith v. Maryland, which is the controlling law. Smith v. Maryland involved one tap on one person's phone; it's been used to cover the NSA bulk metadata collection program, thus proving the slippery slope is not a fallacy.
It'll take the robed 9 to overturn it, but they likely won't.
If someone calls you, they will have to check all the cell towers (in a short amount of time) to figure out which tower is closest to you. And that's expensive and wasteful for millions of calls that happen every day.
of this technology.
This is what the "Obama's coming to take over Texas and take our guns away" crowd just doesn't get. What the hell do you need guns for? That's decades behind the time. The government is taking over our lives with information, not guns.
Since no one here actually read the opinion, and /. has once again engaged in sensationalism (what else is new), I feel it necessary to point out a few things:
* NONE of this data included GPS data from the phone
* NONE of this data included ANY data from the phone AT ALL
* NONE of this data included ANY kind of location data when the phone was not in use
The data in question is toll record data that indicates a phone number and the cell tower it is using to make a call. Obviously this information isn't very precise to start with, so wasn't central to the actual trial in the first place. If the government had wanted to get GPS or "prospective location" information ('pings' from unused phones as they traverse space) that has been fairly well litigated already as requiring a warrant (not saying people don't break rules, but the case law there is much clearer). This was a very fine point that is not earthshattering or groundbreaking in any way (basically a translation of existing Call Detail Record landline data case law to the mobile space).
From TFS:
In other words, we assert you probably know your privacy is being violated by existing technical means, so we'll just ignore the obvious constitutional instructions about warrants when dealing with personal information -- whereabouts, in this instance. Because the constitution is abused and/or ignored by most judges now, so that's ok, right? RIGHT?
Let's say some people commit murder in parks. Because they do. So, using the "reasoning" of the utter morons in this court:
And therefore, it's perfectly ok. Mr. Murderer, go forth and murder some more. Next Case!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And by "we", of course you mean the tiny, tiny minority that isn't... sitting in front of their television, a string of drool trailing from their partially open mouths, while the latest reports of Kim Kardassian's antics reflects from the their glazed eyes and the Doritos grease spots around their mouth. Or the deluded information-poor who consume Faux News broadcasts as if they were (cough) actual journalism.
Metaphorically speaking, little tiny soapboxes located at huge distances from one another, that no useful number of people pay any significant attention to... yep, that's pretty much right where we are.
It's not a slippery slope. It's a deep pit, and we're at the bottom already. They've just painted the sides with jingoistic and fear-inspiring slogans, that's all. The only way out is to stand on each other's shoulders, but that would require the use of backbone, which our society currently lacks in any significant sense.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Technically, no.
For the government, as it is explicitly constrained from legitimately doing so by the constitution, yes, it is something special.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The federal and state governments have more constraints than you do.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You'll get better treatment if you join a mafia.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Do not set yourselt against police...http://www.topbagsspot.com
If you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when using a cell phone (with regard to metadata), then why is it illegal for ordinary citizens to intercept cellular?
No. That doesn't get rid of them. It just puts them on hold. Next administration can just start enforcing them again.
Getting RID of them is something else entirely.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Paying close attention and actually understanding what is going on.
A law is gone, or "rid of", when it's *gone*. Not when its enforcement is variable, low, presently ignored, or deferred.
Be precise. When your argument or implication is faulty, informed responses will disrupt your points even if the idea behind them had some merit.
Obama's been very effective at using his presidential powers in a legitimate manner. And he's not been shy about it -- unlike most presidents, his actions are published right where you can get at them. This is worth a read.
Lots of hand waving on both sides. The facts are... other.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...that will let you know where The Authorities think you are at any given moment based on cell tower data?
What is the resolution?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.