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:Why no warrant?

[MrKaos]

As usual, TFA is useless. Why didn't the cops get a warrant in this case?

Specifically, because this applies not just to the US, but the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Telecommunication intercepts.

First, politicians can pass laws that are unconstitutional, however they are bits of paper because they violate the constitution which are the founding principles of a nation. Effectively, they aren't laws at all because they are unconstitutional.

In this context, after 9/11, a series of anti terrorism laws were passed in these countries that violated the constitution. In the US Bush by-passed the Attorney General by using his personal attorney and once the political elite of the Bush cabal saw they could pass laws this way without anybody objecting they went crazy establishing the surveillance state we are now subjected to. The reason I know this is because I read and analyzed hundreds of pages of these "laws" and wrote submissions about them.

The political elite came after Telecommunications and the freedom of speech and association that came with it around 2004. I also analyzed these laws which read like a fundamental attack on the constitutional foundations of all western democracies, or what was left of them. Of course the trick for them is not to act on the power in a big an obvious way but to inflict a death by a thousand paper cuts.

So thirteen years later, laws we saw framed under the guise of being used only for the intelligence community to track terrorists is now being used against the populous to track common criminals without using due process which people may not object to, because it's a criminal however just because the police are tracking a criminal doesn't mean they are allowed to commit a criminal act.

For further context, traditionally telecommunication intercepts were treated more seriously than search warrants by judges until anti-terrorism laws made them a moot point.

This is how politician by-pass the will of the people and erode the freedom that a nation is built on with attempt to neuter the constitutional values that are inconvenient and antagonistic to their power over the population.