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

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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  • (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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