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Supreme Court Rules that Warrant is Needed to Access Cell Tower Records

posted by janrinok on Saturday June 23 2018, @11:14AM   
from the only-got-to-ask dept.

DeathMonkey writes:

The Supreme Court on Friday put new restraints on law enforcement's access to the ever-increasing amount of private information about Americans available in the digital age.

In the specific case before the court, the justices ruled that authorities generally must obtain a warrant to gain access to cell-tower records that can provide a virtual timeline and map of a person's whereabouts.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the 5 to 4 decision, in which he was joined by the court's liberal members. Each of the dissenting conservatives wrote separate opinions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-rules-that-warrant-is-needed-to-access-cell-tower-records/2018/06/22/4f85a804-761e-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?utm_term=.a83a00384150

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Original Submission

• Re:Conservative? Re:Conservative? (Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday June 23 2018, @01:57PM (1 child)

  by digitalaudiorock (688) on Saturday June 23 2018, @01:57PM (#697194) Journal

  What's insane is that people just dumbly accepted the completely insecure infrastructure, from the devices to the protocols to the towers, that makes all this eavesdropping not only possible but inevitable, for the most part without a grumble or a twinge. And Alito is right. I still wouldn't have voted with him but he makes an excellent point. There's no legal solution to a technical problem.

  I don't get the logic here. The fact that your phone needs to connect to towers that are near your location is pretty much a given isn't it? How is that a "technological problem" that can be fixed? The fact that they track and keep that information in the first place...let alone what gets done with it very much ARE legal problems.

  I guess I understand the logic to a point, but it seems to imply that unreasonable searches are OK and long as they're not performed by law enforcement, but rather by corporations who later must give it law enforcement on demand. In that case I say outlaw the tracking of that data in the first place...still a legal issue.

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• Re:Conservative? (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Saturday June 23 2018, @06:21PM

  by frojack (1554) on Saturday June 23 2018, @06:21PM (#697297) Journal

  I don't get the logic here. The fact that your phone needs to connect to towers that are near your location is pretty much a given isn't it? How is that a "technological problem" that can be fixed? The fact that they track and keep that information in the first place...let alone what gets done with it very much ARE legal problems.

  Exactly.

  The system has to know which lobe of which tower your phone is connected to in order to do basic things like ring your phone when a call comes in.

  However, They probably don't need to retain this information once your phone disconnects from that tower, because you drove out of range.

  The fact that they do keep this information probably helps more people than it hurts. Missing persons, etc. But even that is arguable these days.

  NOTE:
  There were actually MUCH better articles about this than the WAPost article, as far as reporting the ramifications of this ruling. Read Curt Levey's" article. [foxnews.com]

  The ruling strikes at the heart of The Supreme Court's 40 year old Third-Party Doctrine. That doctrine holds that no search or seizure occurs when the government obtains data that the accused has voluntarily conveyed to a third party – in this case, one's wireless provider.

  The court concluded that the voluntary conveyance assumption behind the Third-Party Doctrine just doesn't hold up when it comes to cell phone location data, because "a cell phone logs a cell-site record by dint of its operation, without any affirmative act on the part of the user beyond powering up."

  Additionally, the Justices serve notice on the "No right to privacy in a public place" apologists:

  More generally, the justices recognized that individuals “have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. ... Allowing government access to cell-site records contravenes that expectation. ... When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user."

  While the court did say:

  "Our decision today is a narrow one. We do not express a view on (scenarios) not before us."

  they also telegraphed their expectations of a flood of litigation based on this ruling, which is far from narrow in its implications. It strikes at the very heart of the Third Party Doctrine, and could lead to eventual trashing of the Stored Communications Act (SCA). [wikipedia.org]

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  No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

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