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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?
Cause last I checked, for a cell phone to work, it kinda has to tell the carrier where they are. At least in general terms. Otherwise, it can't pass the call off to the next cell in the system.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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...
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!
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.
Que the no privacy in public crowd.
thEmselves to be a
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/
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