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DC Court Rules Tracking Phones Without a Warrant Is Unconstitutional (cbsnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Law enforcement use of one tracking tool, the cell-site simulator, to track a suspect's phone without a warrant violates the Constitution, the D.C. Court of Appeals said Thursday in a landmark ruling for privacy and Fourth Amendment rights as they pertain to policing tactics. The ruling could have broad implications for law enforcement's use of cell-site simulators, which local police and federal agencies can use to mimic a cell phone tower to the phone connect to the device instead of its regular network. In a decision that reversed the decision of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and overturned the conviction of a robbery and sexual assault suspect, the D.C. Court of Appeals determined the use of the cell-site simulator "to locate a person through his or her cellphone invades the person's actual, legitimate and reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her location information and is a search."
As usual, TFA is useless. Why didn't the cops get a warrant in this case?
That's seems like an overreach...
It would make sense, that police can not use such methods to intercept the target's communications. But to make even locating the suspect illegal this way is an overreach. An active cell-phone is no different in this regard from a person shouting, for example. Heck, if it is Ok for an officer to recognize a face, it ought to be Ok for a machine to recognize a phone...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Including tracking what is being sent/received to the phone?
As your "papers", safe and secure inside your house, move online, you do indeed maintain the expectation of privacy you did in your home. And in any case, your papers are separate from your home in the expectation of privacy.
The Founding Fathers couldn't have foreseen computers tracking everybody in a dozen different ways, from cell phones to license plate recognition to face recognition to cameras on every corner, all being fed into a machine panopticon for the government to watch you. The days when "well, you have no expectation of privacy" in data handed to a corporation need to come to an end.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Did some rule go into effect that these cell site simulators cannot be called Stingrays in public? Because there have been plenty of topics here before about Stingrays and this is the first time at all that 'Stingray' isn't used at least once in the main topic to refer to them.
I know that the company that makes Stingrays wants NO public discussion of them. Police departmens have even withdrawn cases when the discovery process would have forced public discussion of Stingrays.
It's actually time for a teardown video of one of these critters...
No, the phone absolutely does not work this way. The location is implied by the tower. If it worked the way you say, we wouldn't have been able to use cell phones prior to GPS tech on smartphones since the phone wouldn't know where it was. How did this get modded up? ROFL. Mod moderator down.
Sure, for a cellular phone to work the phone must announce it's location to the carrier. The issue at hand though is that the phone does not have to tell the government where it is located to work. The carrier should not have to tell the government where a phone (and therefore the person carrying it) is located without a warrant. Also, the government cannot set up a fake cell site to scoop up the locations of people without a warrant.
I'm trying to think of how these fake cell sites could be used any more after a ruling like this. For these things to work they have to announce their presence to every phone in range and just kind of hope the person they are looking for is in range. In the process though they'll be grabbing the phone numbers, locations, and perhaps more information from every cell phone in range. In a large city this could easily be thousands of people as they move in and out of range. How can a fake cell site be made to work and not scoop up all this information?
I doubt that this will be the end of this nonsense, but it should make the government think real hard about doing stuff like this again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Presumably the cops thought they didn't need a warrant.
A lot of the legal framework in the US around these matters dates back to the time of the Bill of Rights. In general courts have viewed police suspicion as something that doesn't violate your rights as a citizen. For example if a plainclothes cop decides you look suspicious and tails you for awhile, that's perfectly OK. He doesn't need a warrant.
The problem with technology is that we can now automate that process, and that often changes its character. A cop trailing you to see where you goes is a self-limiting process. It'd be too expensive and time consuming to do to everyone. But since everyone carries a phone now, the police actually can follow them everywhere, all the time, and it would cost them practically nothing. That's way more intrusive, even though on a case by case basis you're doing the exact same thing: keeping tabs on where someone goes.
And here's another wrinkle. Since you divulge your position to the phone company, under US common law it's not your private information. If the phone company decides to relay your position to the cops, it's completely kosher unless that disclosure is forbidden by statute or the court gets creative.
What technology allows the police to do obviously violates the spirit of the Constitution; so what the court has done is what courts sometimes done in similar cases (like contraception): try to infer underlying principles from the Bill of Rights and extrapolate them to the current situation under the 9th Amendment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Trump's Supreme Court will reverse this.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
>Sure, for a cellular phone to work the phone must announce it's location to the carrier.
No.
The cell tower announces its location to the phone.
The phone announces its desire to connect to the tower.
If there's an ongoing session, a number of towers may already be informed of your phone and your phone has a session reference it can use so the new tower can grab the session from the previous tower as handover occurs.
The business of a tower inferring your phone's location came later and was all to do with selling 'location services', which of course, GPS undermined. Who would pay for that?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
USSC did conclude, that the use of GPS-trackers requires a warrant (see, this is how you cite things.)
But that — unanimous — decision explicitly said:
No such occupying private property took place in the case in TFA, which fully invalidates your argument.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, about fucking time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
In the past a new powerful mil grade network would become the new local cell network for an area. Every phone in the area would connect to the new more powerful cell network.
That worked well for law enforcement for a while. Most people did not notice the unexpected extra service quality they got with no carrier investment.
Over time app maps got created of cell networks that would show any strange new service that was not part of ongoing carrier upgrades.
Apps started mapping the powerful law enforcement cell networks been activated in areas served by very average cell towers.
The next gen try hard to look like real cell towers, like any other telco in the area. Less of that new network quality and jump in power but still able to take over all cell connections in the area.
Voice prints is the real fun part. What was once used for nations to collect on other nations most interesting people is now been offered to any state or city with ongoing federal/state/city police funding levels.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No. The cell tower announces its location to the phone.
No. The cell tower announces its existence to the phone. The phone doesn't care where the tower is.
The phone announces its desire to connect to the tower.
Yes. At that point, the cell tower becomes interested in where the phone is so it can optimize service. I.e., use phase array antenna systems to direct the signal toward the phone.
The cell tower uses the same phased array antennas to figure out what direction the phone is, and the received signal strength to estimate distance. It can also use time-of-flight or response time of the phone for distance. Distance is important because it changes the signal timing in LTE.
The business of a tower inferring your phone's location came later and was all to do with selling 'location services',
No. It came along later in cell history, but not for the reason you claim. The early cell technology was not advanced enough to do the location.
Someone claimed you could hear an Automatic Teller Machine printing money before it was dispensed. An early troll.
Who cued the idiotic AC comments?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Can they go back to closed cases and reverse them? Justice is justice.
They won't need a warrant.
All they need to do is show the phone to the suspect and find incriminating evidence.
http://saveie6.com/
Needing the know the location is to be able to route network initiated paging to the phone. Otherwise, which tower would you let broadcast it.
Phased array aiming is usually done by inverting the channel, the position is never directly computed. The best pattern is not necessarily a beam pointing to you, in a non-line-of-sight scenario.
I believe the handset provides information to the tower about power level it is seeing.
the pocket of my pants where I keep the phone is private property, the data kept on the phone is private property, the computing environment on the phone used to access the data is private property.
Yep. And none of it was “physically occupied” by the government...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It will be overturned or simply ignored.
This is America, dammit. Land of the surveillance state.
Further down though, there is the clarification that the search has to be "reasonable" which the NC Supreme Court did not address. Hence they vacated the judgement back to the lower court to address the issue as to whether attaching a GPS tracker for LIFE, not just some arbitrary time frame in this instance, is to be considered reasonable.
I could see this decision to be reversed if the NC court system demonstrates that it is reasonable as this plaintiff was a repeat-offender for the same crime, so this actually could be considered reasonable.
This is the next problem. This E911 law needs to be more easily and automatically circumvented by default, if we can't get it repealed. And we can't get it repealed. I think that law is a bad idea, and yet there are some pretty obvious and irrefutable arguments in favor of it. It's ambiguously bad, and that's enough to keep it forever.
Therefore, we need our phones to finally stop being phones. To put it in AppleSpeak, we need it to be easier to upgrade iPhones to iPod Touches. Or from Android phones to 5" Android mini-tablets. Then tack on the cellphone transceiver as an aftermarket add-on... which people who live in ubiquitous-wifi areas might literally not bother doing.
For this to work well (have add-on peripherals become viable; currently all our phones totally suck to an embarrassing degree, compared to even a 30-year-old desktop) we need standardized form factors and for "build your own white-box" to be happening. But the fucking market isn't supporting that. It's hard to get there, yet it's so damn attractive. Oh well, it's something to strive for and encourage. Today's phones suck so much, in so many ways, and this would solve many of the problems, including the always-being-tracked problem.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Knowledge doesn't equal permissible in court. Intelligence or law enforcement can "know" a lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean it's permissible as evidence in a court of law. More than that, if a private company has knowledge that the police would like to use as evidence they have to get a warrant to get access to that knowledge. So it really doesn't matter if the cell company knows where you are if that is privileged knowledge that is unavailable to police without a warrant.
Needing the know the location is to be able to route network initiated paging to the phone.
The phone does not need to know the tower location, nor does the tower need to know the phone location for this.
Otherwise, which tower would you let broadcast it.
Are you serious? The tower to which the phone is connected. You do realize, I hope, that phones make a connection to the cell site even when you aren't actively making a call. They register with a site, which is how the phone knows who the carrier is, what services are available, and can get SMS/data.
Phased array aiming is usually done by inverting the channel, the position is never directly computed.
It may never be reported in human coordinates. I don't know, it doesn't matter. The location is, however, "computed", since it is relevant to optimizing the signal and minimizing power needed for the connection.
The best pattern is not necessarily a beam pointing to you, in a non-line-of-sight scenario.
The best pattern is almost always a path going back the same way the incoming signal appears to come from. That is very very often a direct line of sight, but even if it is not, any indirect path from the low power phone will cause an incorrect position. That incorrect position will probably be fixed if the phone moves (as mobile or portable phones tend to), and still generates the optimal return path.