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Supreme Court Agrees To Decide Major Privacy Case On Cellphone Data (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a major case on privacy rights in the digital age that will determine whether police officers need warrants to access past cellphone location information kept by wireless carriers. The justices agreed to hear an appeal brought by a man who was arrested in 2011 as part of an investigation into a string of armed robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in the Detroit area over the preceding months. Police helped establish that the man, Timothy Carpenter, was near the scene of the crimes by securing cell site location information from his cellphone carrier. At issue is whether failing to obtain a warrant violates a defendant's right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The information that law enforcement agencies can obtain from wireless carriers shows which local cellphone towers users connect to at the time they make calls. Police can use historical data to determine if a suspect was in the vicinity of a crime scene or real-time data to track a suspect.
1) Should police obtain this kind of data. The answer to that is YES, they should.
2) Separate issue is should they get a warrant first. That is also a yes.
Basically what it comes down to is this. Anything a normal citizen could get arrested for should be require a warrant for the police to do.
The reason for this simple, police are human beings and according to most surveys are 96% honest. But normal citizens are 95% honest. That means police are more honest than other people, but only by a little bit. So we need to limit their ability to abuse their authority, just as we limit regular citizens.
In other words, if you can't trust your neighbor to have the right to do something, then neither should you trust the police to do it.
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My (admittedly non-lawyer) interpretation would be that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons... against unreasonable searches and seizures" means that a person should be free to move as they please without the government "searching and seizing" their locations. If the police want this data (and there can be very good reasons why they would need it), then the path is simple:
1) Convince a judge that this is needed.
2) Get said judge to issue a warrant.
3) Use the warrant to get the location data.
It's that simple. No Supreme Court case required and a proper balance struck between police ensuring safety and citizens' rights.
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I would suggest that the idea of "papers" is expanded to include all forms of "electronic records" owned or controlled by the Citizen. If My letter to my wife is on paper or electronic version thereof, the effect is the same. The media shouldn't matter.
Cell Phones are "papers" in effect, even if they aren't made of literal paper.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
But that case was based on the fact that the police had to physically touch the car to install it. So the precedent is very narrow. If they could track the car without physically touching it, then they have a way around the limitation. Given the prevalence of license plate scanners, traffic cameras, cell towers, drones, and camera-laden aircraft, it seems like that case won't have teeth for very long.
That may be another area that will require the courts to make decisions in the future.
In the past it has been perfectly legal for the police to follow a subject that is in-public throughout that person's movements, and the argument was that since anyone could observe the subject in-public, police were free to do so as well. Those kinds of observation required officers to do the observing though, present at the site, themselves.
The use of the GPS tracker is employing a tool as a tracker without a person doing the observing. We already have precedent that while police are allowed to enter the curtilage of private property to knock on the door to speak with the occupants, they are not allowed to employ tools beyond their own natural senses to look for crimes while doing so. It would not be a stretch that some middle-ground in tracking a subject's movements would require officers to be personally observing a subject in-public in order to do so without a warrant, or if they are allowed to employ tools, they must be simple in nature and must be personally operated by the observing individual on-scene. That would probably preclude most forms of autonomous observation without a warrant.
Don't forget with license-plate scanners, the license plate does not belong to the car owner, but belongs to the state. It may be a bit of a hollow argument, but perhaps the state has the right to look at their own property.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
For all the Trump hate in this thread, Gorsuch has historically been pretty skeptical of 4th Amendment overreach (way more than Scalia ever was). For the first time in a long time, there is actually a pretty good chance that this could swing towards more 4th Amendment protection.
Nobody, right or left, is trying to overturn the crime of armed robbery. Just as with Miranda, most our the land mark cases that have established constitutional limitations on police have dealt with criminals. This actually has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. It's a case needed to establish precedent in yet another area where technology has outpaced the law.
As with the GP AC post. Your attempt to make this political, just shows how ignorant and foolish you are.
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