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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.
Now, what about things like license plate trackers that track where your car goes?
The question of what requires a warrant needs to have a simple answer that is easy to apply.
My solution: If an unaffiliated private individual would be expected to be able, both technically and legally, to conduct the same operation, then no warrant is required. In these cases, there is no expectation of privacy, as anyone could gather the same evidence.
Once you go beyond that standard, there is an expectation of privacy, so the government should require some checks on the power to violate that privacy. The standard check is a court-issued warrant.
A few years ago I had been drafted into jury duty for the 9th circuit in California. The case involved some sort of Medicare scam involving bogus sales of medical "devices" such as mobility scooters. During the jury selection process, prosecutors asked the pool whether any prospective jurors took issue with warrantless location tracking via cell phone towers. Apparently I was the only person who took issue with this, because the other 71 people in the room did not raise their hands. My public conversation with the court went something like this:
Prosecutor: Why do you take exception to warrantless location tracking?
Me: I believe the 3rd party doctrine is being abused in a manner that is unconstitutional and therefore illegal
Judge: I will decide what is legal and illegal, and your job is to decide innocence or guilt
Me: Richard Nixon once declared that "if the President does it, it's not illegal". We all know how that turned out. I will decide for myself whether the spirit of the Constitution is being violated
Jurors were then adjourned while the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney negotiated a jury pool. The pool was then welcomed back into the room, and I was thanked for my service, but then dismissed.
It's nice to see the Supreme Court finally came to the same conclusion.
Then don't comment. His dissenting opinion is surprisingly knowledgeable and relevant to the current Information Age in which we live. Try reading. It is amazing.
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. "
Did you even read his argument as to why he dissented? Obviously not, otherwise you'd know that he did because he felt that the other opinions were too vague in order to be in favor of it. Go on, read it. Dust off that annotated copy of rulings, and you'll figure it out. When you do, you'll also figure out why you look like an idiot to anyone who's studied law.
So you are saying that rather than vote for it, even though he thought that it is not precise enough, he decided to vote against it and write that it is not precise enough.
Still pretty obvious whose interests he is siding with then IMHO.
including Trump's boy Gorsuch, voted that fuck your privacy rights,
Did you even read his argument as to why he dissented? Obviously not, otherwise you'd know that he did because he felt that the other opinions were too vague in order to be in favor of it. Go on, read it. Dust off that annotated copy of rulings, and you'll figure it out. When you do, you'll also figure out why you look like an idiot to anyone who's studied law.
If Gorsuch thought that a warrant is needed, he would have voted that way. If he did, but didn't like the reasoning that Roberts et al used, he could have written a concurring opinion. The fact that he voted that a warrant isn't necessary tells you that he thinks a warrant isn't necessary.