Slashdot Mirror
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.
In a way, I'm somewhat (day 10%) okay with this, but ONLY if it's additional information to corroborate what is already known. Like "We have security cameras that captured the suspect's image, we have fingerprints at the scene of the crime, and we have cellphone data to corroborate." But in that case, if it's corroborating, then they would have time to get warrants. But at the same time, I say "Oh hells no," if that's where you're going first because without other data, it's all circumstantial. Okay, so I talked myself into being pretty much (99%) against it in any circumstance. Welcome to my Monday morning haze.
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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."
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
I agree with you, especially in an era when it appears that it is not that difficult for the police or the district attorney to create a convincing argument as to why the warrant is necessary.
What a court case may do though, is to establish the conditions in which warrants should be asked-for and the conditions for the judge to evaluate whether or not to grant, and even possibly conditions necessary to unmask who the subscriber for a given handset belongs to and if there are any other frequent contacts with that handset. For example, would the police be allowed to ask all carriers for all handsets that communicated in a given area for a given time duration? Given the nature of things like bombing attacks, how far ahead of an attack could a law enforcement agency look? Can they compare the probably large list of handsets to subscriber information to somewhat-identify who these people are? Or would they be limited to having previously narrowed-in on a particular subject, to only asking for the whereabouts of that person for specific time durations, say during the lead-up to the crime or during the window of a given incident?
This case could decide at least some of that.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why the fuck is the past location data even kept? That should be a focus.
Twinstiq, game news
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.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Both in Canada and the US, the Constitutions preclude these unwarranted searches and seizures of people who just happen to be in the vicinity (many many miles) of a cell tower, or a fake cell tower in this case.
And the lies that they exclude your information if you're not the target have been proven over and over again.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Besides plate scanners, lots of the North East use EZ-Pass for toll collection and also employ sensors scattered around to also collect the ID information. Theoretically it is used for traffic flow understanding, but that could certainly be "expanded" depending on case-law, and the EZ-Pass is an optional, leased piece of property.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I was going to mod you down, and then decided I'd respond instead since I haven't modded this discussion yet.
It's not the carrier's job to ensure the police are following the law.
Are you demented? It is the carrier's job, as custodian of my data, to follow proper procedures of the law and require the police to produce a warrant for the said information. What's next? Police can get my call records without a warrant? Police can walk into a hospital and get my medical records without a warrant?
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?