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:Not even to locate?..

[HeckRuler]

They're not a suspect. There's no warrant. If they had cause to suspect someone, they could probably go get a warrant.

Assume that if the cops or feds don't need a warrant, they're doing it all the time to everyone and can use that against you whenever they see fit. Are you ok with the city cops keeping a database of everyone's location at all times?

If they do need a warrant, assume the cops and feds are doing it whenever they can to everyone... but can't use that in court so they find something else to nail you on. See: Parallel Construction.

Great expectations

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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.