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."

Comments

Re:So... no more cell phones?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Because US law is archaic.

[hey!]

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.

Re:Because US law is archaic.

[hey!]

OK, that's a good starting point.

But what if the common man in the street could, in principle, buy information on someone else? Or could in principle assemble that information if he had sufficient time and resources?

You see, a government that is limited to what the common man in the street can do can be far more intrusive because they have more resources -- ditto for corporations. You have to limit government more than you limit the common man in the street. And you probably have to limit what very rich men in the street can do too.