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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

• No, they did not. (Score: 3, Informative) by MrGuy on Sunday June 24 2018, @01:42AM

  by MrGuy (1007) on Sunday June 24 2018, @01:42AM (#697426)

  Headline is absolutely wrong. I realize the press reporting is also wrong in many stories on this. But it's important.

  What the court specifically ruled was that the police tracking an individual's location continuously over the course of seven days was not constitutional without a warrant.

  The decision is narrow, and does NOT set a blanket requirement a warrant for all requests for cell phone data. It carves out multiple cases that it specifically does NOT cover, including getting all individuals in an area, or tracing a suspect "temporarily," or checking whether someone was in a particular place at a particular time.

  The ruling is considerably better news than if things had gone the other way, but this is nowhere near a ruling that "cell tower access requires a warrant." They ruled it's required in one specific case, and indicates it's probably NOT required in many, many others.

  Scotusblog's [scotusblog.com] Amy Howe provides a more accurate assessment of what was actually ruled.

  Roberts emphasized that today’s ruling “is a narrow one” that applies only to historical cell-site location records. He took pains to point out that the ruling did not “express a view on” other privacy issues, such as obtaining cell-site location records in real time, or getting information about all of the phones that connected to a particular tower at a particular time. He acknowledged that law-enforcement officials might sometimes still be able to obtain cell-site location records without a warrant – for example, to deal with emergencies such as “bomb threats, active shootings, and child abductions.” And in a footnote, he also left open the possibility that law-enforcement officials might not need a warrant to obtain cell-site location records for a shorter period of time than the seven days at issue in Carpenter’s case – which might allow them to get information about where someone was on the day of a crime, for example. But what law-enforcement officials do not have, he wrote in closing, is “unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of” cell-site location information.

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