Slashdot Mirror
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
"Your phone carrier MUST know"
Yes, but that's not the same as saying the _police_ should know.
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.
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?
'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.
I read the decision. Go read the first few pages (linked in TFS). It makes perfect sense to me.
What do you think happened here? The cops didn't just go mining some random guy's cell signal.
They already had tons of evidence against the guy. Eyewitness testimony. Camera footage of the armed robberies (someone matching his description). DNA evidence collected from the getaway car. The government presented this to a federal magistrate who said it constitutes reasonable grounds for the government to seize the phone records that are relevant and material to the case.
And the only data they got was, for the specific two month period the armed robberies were underway, this one person's call records, limited to phone number, data/time/duration, incoming or outgoing, and the cell tower location. No call contents. No text message contents. No keep-alive packets or other location tracking data when the phone was powered but not making or receiving a call. No GPS data. Just enough to say "we know the suspect was in this mile and a half radius making a phone call near the time of the robbery."
So what do you think is the problem?
Were there not reasonable grounds to authorize the order? Not enough evidence? Were the phone records not relevant to the case? Do you think too much information was seized?
I'm genuinely curious as to where you think the government overreach occurred in this case, or if you just think the government should never be able to seize or search anything for any reason.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I assert that the problem was not that they didn't have enough evidence. The problem is that even though they had evidence to get a warrant, they didn't, which sets them up to avoid getting warrants in future cases where they don't have all that evidence.