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Supreme Court: Warrant Generally Needed To Track Cell Phone Location Data (cnn.com)
daveschroeder writes: The Supreme Court on Friday said the government generally needs a warrant if it wants to track an individual's location through cell phone records over an extended period of time. The ruling [PDF] is a major victory for advocates of increased privacy rights who argued more protections were needed when it comes to the government obtaining information from a third party such as a cell phone company. The 5-4 opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the four most liberal justices. It is a loss for the Justice Department, which had argued that an individual has diminished privacy rights when it comes to information that has been voluntarily shared with someone else.
and strongly supported by Trump's justice department. Both sides wanted the opposite of this ruling.
I hate fat people.
So, the liberals on the court voted in favor of your right to privacy and the "conservatives", including Trump's boy Gorsuch, voted that fuck your privacy rights, the police need to track you without a warrant. Also, the Trump Administration argued that your freedom isn't as important as the right of the government to track you.
Remember that the next time some Republican or Trumpist tells you that they're all about the rights of the individual and smaller government. Republicans will always be the party of authoritarianism and the elite.
Did you read the ruling? It's very interesting. This is from the dissent:
"The Court has twice held that individuals have no
Fourth Amendment interests in business records which
are possessed, owned, and controlled by a third party.
United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435 (1976); Smith v.
Maryland, 442 U. S. 735 (1979). This is true even when
the records contain personal and sensitive information. So
when the Government uses a subpoena to obtain, for
example, bank records, telephone records, and credit card
statements from the businesses that create and keep these
records, the Government does not engage in a search of
the business’s customers within the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment.
In this case petitioner challenges the Government’s
right to use compulsory process to obtain a now-common
kind of business record: cell-site records held by cell phone
service providers. The Government acquired the records
through an investigative process enacted by Congress.
Upon approval by a neutral magistrate, and based on the
Government’s duty to show reasonable necessity, it authorizes
the disclosure of records and information that are
under the control and ownership of the cell phone service
provider, not its customer. Petitioner acknowledges that
the Government may obtain a wide variety of business
records using compulsory process, and he does not ask the
Court to revisit its precedents. Yet he argues that, under
those same precedents, the Government searched his
records when it used court-approved compulsory process to
obtain the cell-site information at issue here.
Cell-site records, however, are no different from the
many other kinds of business records the Government has
a lawful right to obtain by compulsory process. Customers
like petitioner do not own, possess, control, or use the
records, and for that reason have no reasonable expectation
that they cannot be disclosed pursuant to lawful
compulsory process.
The Court today disagrees. It holds for the first time
that by using compulsory process to obtain records of a
business entity, the Government has not just engaged in
an impermissible action, but has conducted a search of the
business’s customer. The Court further concludes that the
search in this case was unreasonable and the Government
needed to get a warrant to obtain more than six days of
cell-site records. "