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The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday in Carpenter v. United States, a case dealing with the use of cell phone records without a warrant using the Stored Communications Act:
The irony of the case before the court, Carpenter v. United States, is that it involves massive cellphone thefts and a string of armed robberies at Radio Shacks in Michigan and Ohio. The robbers entered the stores, guns drawn, herded patrons to the back, loaded up laundry bags with new smartphones, and then later sold their booty to fences for tens of thousands of dollars per haul.
[...] The question before the Supreme Court is whether the cops should have gotten a search warrant in order to obtain the cell location information. A warrant would have required them to show a judge that they had probable cause to believe those records contained evidence of a crime. What the police did instead was obtain a court order under the federal Stored Communications Act, which is easier. In this case, as in others, prosecutors argue that the Supreme Court has long viewed information shared by a consumer as fair game without a warrant. Even before the Stored Communications law was enacted, the high court ruled that you lose your Fourth Amendment right to privacy when you share information with a third party, like the phone company.
Fourth Amendment scholar Orin Kerr contends that the idea of tracking someone's movements in public is not new. The police, for instance, tail a suspect, or check on his alibi. Only when they search the suspect's home or person do they have to get a court-approved warrant. Kerr contends that the cell-cite location records at issue in this case "are basically the network equivalent of public observation that traditionally would not be protected" by a warrant requirement. After all, he notes, the cell-site location information is not maintained by government decree. Rather, wireless providers keep the data recorded by cell towers in order to monitor and improve their service.
Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging that argument in the Supreme Court. This kind of cellphone technology "really changes the game and threatens to upend our expectation of privacy in the digital age," he says. After all, he argues, this wasn't a case of the police following a shady person.
"They decided after the fact they wanted to try to tie him [Carpenter] to a crime," Wessler says, "and never before in the history of this country has the government had the power to press rewind on someone's life and chart out where they were going over the course of four months." Four months and nearly 13,000 calls, to be precise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:50PM (4 children)
There perhaps once was, and there ought to be, but nowadays is there really a reasonable expectation of privacy?
Only a fool expects their location and phone calls to be private while using a cell.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @06:26PM (2 children)
See that is the problem. We need to start fixing it so that people can have an expectation of privacy. At the VERY least we should be drafting laws to punish the crap out of privacy violators.
For law enforcement activities we have these great things called "warrants" which give them a lot of leeway in violating someone's privacy. User data should not be collected or stored without a warrant, and telecoms should be very liable for aiding in such violations sans warrants.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday November 29 2017, @07:01PM (1 child)
Yes. That. Exactly.
Fixing problems is why we have amendments such as the 1st, 4th, 5th, etc.
Now those protections are being undermined because technology is new. It needs to be fixed.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:12PM
Bbbbb but this is the world now! Everything is different! Down with democracy and rule of law! Series of contracts for everybody!
Sorry, so annoyed at the online trolls trying to undermine society. At least the contracts guy is supposedly working for a better future.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:41PM
Location (generally) can't be private because cell phones connect to towers, (all the time) if for no other reason than call routing.
However, there is no reason this data has to persist for more than the duration of that connection. Once your phone disconnects from Tower A and connects to Tower B, there is no longer any reason for tower A (or the managing computer network) to retain any information about that prior connection.
There is no reason other than 911 for your phone to transmit its precise GPS coordinates to the phone company or to Google (unless you request this for navigation purposes).
The first step is probably to start limiting what the phone company can legally keep. The nonsense of improving service is silly. They need keep only anonymous tower connection counts, connects disconnects, and billable call logs. (And since most calls are not actually billed anymore there's no reason to keep that either).
Getting rid of bogus record keeping excuses would not hinder warranted taps, or warranted tracking. The cell company flips a switch in the database and the system starts keeping records for some duration.
Stored communications laws was intended for email that you left (abandoned) on someone's pop server. Not records someone else collected for providing you a service.
Before cellphones people had anonymity and privacy as the went about their daily business. Passing someone in the street (someone who knows you or a complete stranger) does not come close to surveillance or surrender of privacy. Walking a street full of people provides you no information about them beyond a fleeting image. Their life is still private to you.
People who keep repeating this No expectation of privacy in public mantra are useful idiots.
If lawyers, doctors, and librarians can have specific protection of records then there is no reason phone companies can't as well.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.