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US Court Says No Warrant Needed For Cellphone Location Data (reuters.com)
Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: Police do not need a warrant to obtain a person's cellphone location data held by wireless carriers, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a setback to privacy advocates. The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, voted 12-3 that the government can get the information under a decades-old legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company. The ruling overturns a divided 2015 opinion from the court's three-judge panel and reduces the likelihood that the Supreme Court would consider the issue. The decision arose from several armed robberies in Baltimore and Baltimore County, Maryland, in early 2011, leading to the convictions of Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan. The convictions were based in part on 221 days of cellphone data investigators obtained from wireless provider Sprint, which included about 29,000 location records for the defendants, according to the appeals court opinion.
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They aren't neutered. They simply are able to deadlock. Doesn't mean they will, or have to.
There's no set size for the court. It's been larger, and it's been smaller. It's been even numbered and it's been odd numbered.
Doesn't much matter anyway. They do whatever they want. We're long past them actually paying any attention to the oaths they swore.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Except you're wrong, there IS a law against disclosure of this VERY information, see here https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/222.
Now, it would be up to you to find a law that authorizes law enforcement to get this information without a warrant, which I doubt there is because then we wouldn't have conflicting rulings in various courts nor would this court have to rely on '3rd party data sharing precedent'.
In fact the I referenced is so directly on point that I find it incredible that any court could rule the way they have...thus the point one poster made about 'judicial activism'. Judges have no right to 'make law', only interpret it and there's a law that says telecommunications companies can NOT even share location data unless authorized by the customer or for the purposes of 'emergency services' (e.g. 911 calls).