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.

Comments

Re:Hasn't this already been decided?

[TWX]

It may depend on if they determine that the records are owned by the subscriber and only being warehoused by the carrier, or if they're owned by the carrier.

This is also arguably new caselaw, in that this wanders into the same arena as when law enforcement plants GPS trackers on suspects' vehicles, which I believe was ruled as requiring a warrant. If we have a fundamental right to privacy from our government then it would follow that the government would need a demonstrable reason to track our movements or to look up any available movement history, and that such a look would need to be sufficiently narrow in-scope. Additionally this isn't a case where police start monitoring a subject and do so for a duration, it's going back through records. So it seems to have aspects of both, but also not be the same as either.

If you look at the actual wording of the beginning of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution it reads, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause[...]" The language, "persons, houses, papers, and effects," seems pretty broad, like the intention was to be as literally as broad as possible, especially with the inclusion of, "effects," as a catch-all. If the police themselves were making records as they observe a subject then that would be creating their own records, but they're accessing someone else's records instead of their own. Perhaps these records about the person, created without the person's understanding of the technology involved, would count as, "effects," even if they don't necessarily count as, "papers."

Bad Feeling

[Khyber]

I have the feeling that the USSC will 'narrowly' rule that since the private company gave up the data voluntarily to the police without coercion that no rights were violated. I doubt there's anything in the cellular contract that actually protects the customer, knowing how businesses run these past several decades.