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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.
Of course warrants should be mandated. Without monitoring and checks, the victims of police have little or no protection or legal recourse. To prevent abuse the police should be monitored and checked constantly in every way feasible while on the job. Here are just a few of the recent examples of police corruption and abuse.
- In Denver, the police are stealing cars.
- In New York, police handcuffed and raped a teenager. Then over a dozen other cops threatened the victim to prevent her from reporting the crime.
- Police steal more than criminals.
- In Utah a cop who assaulted and arrested a nurse for objecting to his inappropriate demands to draw blood from a suspect.
- In Los Angeles a cop was caught by his own body cam planting drugs on a suspect.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I happened to recently read a couple of insightful articles by law professors about this specific case.
The first article made the very good point that a positive law rule covers a lot of this. In other words, if a regular private citizen couldn't normally get the information, then the Police should need a warrant to get it.
The second writer says he disagrees, but mostly makes the point that just using that standard isn't enough, because sometimes there are other factors which would go into a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
Personally, I'm hoping for a bright-line test for the police to come out of this case which lets everyone know that the police can't go through data people normally don't have access to. I'm not holding by breath, though.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.