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Justices Ponder Need For Warrant For Cellphone Tower Data (apnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Like almost everyone else in America, thieves tend to carry their cellphones with them to work. When they use their phones on the job, police find it easier to do their jobs. They can get cellphone tower records that help place suspects in the vicinity of crimes, and they do so thousands of times a year. Activists across the political spectrum, media organizations and technology experts are among those arguing that it is altogether too easy for authorities to learn revealing details of Americans' lives merely by examining records kept by Verizon, T-Mobile and other cellphone service companies. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court hears its latest case about privacy in the digital age. At issue is whether police generally need a warrant to review the records. Justices on the left and right have recognized that technology has altered privacy concerns. The court will hear arguments in an appeal by federal prison inmate Timothy Carpenter. He is serving a 116-year sentence after a jury convicted him of armed robberies in the Detroit area and northwestern Ohio.
If you have to think about it for too long, then you should err on the side of individual rights. When, exactly, did getting a warrant become such a burden on law enforcement?
The accused in the case robbed some Radio Shacks and cell phone stores and (ironically) stole phones. He didn't kill or seriously maim anyone.
How does what amounts to a life sentence make sense for this crime? Especially while pharma CEOs who get people hooked on opioids, polluters who cause cancer clusters, etc walk free.
Answer: it was his punishment for requesting a jury trial, not entering into a plea bargain under threat of a severe sentence. This case embodies a lot of what is wrong with the American injustice system. Even if you have no sympathy for the accused, remember that the taxpayers will be paying to jail him for life, instead of giving him a reasonable sentence and rehabilitating him.
This is money that can be spent on other services or simply returned to the taxpayers. Beyond disgusting.
Armed robbery is bad, and multiple armed robberies is worse, but 116 years seems like overkill.
I know it's not the point of the article... but I feel like the sentencing algorithms have some bugs.
I stole this Sig
It is not public information, but it is also not yours, or my information that we own. It is like getting the video from the liquor store cameras to ID the bastard that just robbed it.
In which case you know there was a robbery and you have reason to believe the video contains the details of the crime.
That's a bit different than walking in and saying, hey, give me all the video on this guy. No reason, just I want it. It's also a bit different from the liquor store reporting a crime and surrendering video related to the details of that crime: they're not under law enforcement order to surrender that information, and are attaching it as relevant to a crime which has been committed against them.
Further, places with CCTV announce they have CCTV. This is to avoid laws forbidding them from recording you without consent of all involved parties.
By contrast, your cell phone provider may or may not be storing data about you long-term, but is presumably recording information for a time—long enough to keep track of where you are at the moment, so the towers function, at a minimum. If you commit a crime against their network, they have every right to bundle relevant data up and submit it with their complaint to the police or courts. Typically, the police initiate the contact, and request they surrender data about you.
There's no reason the government should be allowed to arbitrarily poke into non-public information about you. If they don't have and cannot obtain a warrant, they shouldn't be allowed to thumb through private data at their leisure to build a case about your contact patterns so as to open up an investigation against you. No, they shouldn't be allowed to just request CCTV data, either--your shop can volunteer the relevant recordings when reporting a crime, and they can ask you for the relevant recordings if the next guy over got robbed and they believe you captured something of that, as they'll have a warrant for obtaining that data.
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I would take the side they don't need a warrant for the cell tower triangulation data if the phone company is willing to part with it.
If no warrant is required, then how is the phone company supposed to know it is a legitimate crime investigation, and not some cop trying to track down the guy dating his ex-girlfriend?
Many people assume that getting a warrant is an undue burden. Most jurisdictions have judges available or on-call 24/7, and a judge can review and issue a warrant in a few minutes if it is clearly justified.
You misspelled "privileges"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So basically, what you're saying is, "If you don't want your phone calls eavesdropped, you should not use a device that broadcasts them over radio frequency."
That would be what I say. It's pretty obvious. If you want to keep a secret, don't transmit it via the public airwaves in a way that anyone who wants to can listen in. I think that's a pretty common sense attitude to have. Unfortunately, we have precedent from morons who thought their analog cell calls were guaranteed to be private despite being able to be received by UHF TV sets. That led to 47USC302 that mandates frequency blocks on radios over parts of the cell bands.
People who transmit their voice using radio should be educated that they are doing that, not coddled into thinking there is some magic that turns the insecure medium they are using into a secure one. And people who carry devices that they know can be used to track them whereever they go should learn to live with the natural result of their decision, not have artificial legal protections put in place to allow them their convenience while avoiding the results of their decisions.
If police should need a warrant to listen in on phone calls, they should need a warrant for location information as well.
Why? A conversation includes two people, one of which did not knowingly decide to participate using an insecure channel. The phone's location is not provided by the phone, it is a record kept by the artificial "person" known as "cell phone company". If a company is not a person, then it has no constitutional right to privacy, and no fourth amendment protections.
Remember, this location information is between you and the phone company.
You cannot "remember" something which has never been a fact. The location information is used and created by the phone company; you didn't give it to them. It wasn't "between you", it wasn't some shared secret. It's data they created.
And why is it such a horrible burden for law enforcement to obtain a warrant in the first place?
Sometimes there are time constraints that make it impractical. For example, there's a lost dementia patient who is carrying a cell phone. Where is he? The cell company can tell us. Why shouldn't it? The lost person can do a lot of damage to himself in the time it takes to get a warrant.
Is it because they're afraid a judge will look at their lack of evidence and say "no"?
So you really admit that any warrant requirement would be a rubber stamp hoop to jump through. Why create such things if you know they are going to be meaningless?
I don't think there should be a high bar for being able to search mobile tower records, but there should be a bar.
Specifically, I think any search must first be lodged with the judiciary with full details as to the scope of and reason for the search. And telephony providers should have full audit trails of what searches were performed so it can be verified that the searches complied with the scope.