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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.
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
... with whom I have a contract that ought to contain privacy terms and a disclaimer than certain information may be provided to law enforcement only under due legal process, i.e. a warrant.
Not when it is supplied to a third party, in this case Sprint.
You could say the same thing about data shared with your doctor, your bank, or your lawyer. Disclosing information to a 3rd party does not make it "theirs".
There is a simple test for whether the police need a warrant: Would a normal citizen have legal access to the information? If anyone can go to a cell carrier and get location data on anyone else, then the police should be able to do the same. Otherwise, they should need a warrant.
Except the police generally cannot compel 3rd parties to stand on the street, making a note of every non-homeless person on the street, and then DEMAND their notes. That's what happens here. Sprint et al aren't volunteering this data they're being serviced with a non-warrant court order, an NSL, or whatever. It's EXACTLY the sort of police state that the 4th amendment is designed to halt.
Hell, the cell carriers would not even be storing this data, which is useless to them, if they weren't forced to do so. They need to know location for cell tower purposes, but once you're in a new zone, the old zones aren't useful. Except, of course, for the spying bullshit.