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Title    Supreme Court to Decide if Police can Access Hotel Registries Without Warrants
Date    Wednesday October 22 2014, @11:13PM
Author    azrael
Topic   
from the clawing-the-rights-back-one-by-one dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/10/22/0949217

mendax writes:

Ars has a story that has civil liberties implications galore. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear another Fourth Amendment privacy case, this one related to a Los Angeles ordinance which requires hotels to surrender guest registries to the police upon request without a warrant. From the article:

The justices agreed Monday to hear Los Angeles' appeal of a lower court that ruled 7-4 that the law—meant to combat prostitution, gambling, and even terrorism—was unconstitutional. The law (PDF) requires hotels to provide the information—including guests' credit card number, home address, driver's license information, and vehicle license number—at a moment's notice. Several dozen cities, from Atlanta to Seattle, have similar ordinances. [...]

The appeal is the third high-profile Fourth Amendment case the justices have taken in three years.

In 2012, the justices ruled that authorities generally need search warrants when they affix GPS devices to a vehicle. And earlier this year, the Supreme Court said that the authorities need warrants to peek into the mobile phones of suspects they arrest.

In the latest case, Los Angeles motel owners sued, claiming that the law was a violation of their rights. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the motel owners in December and said the only documents they must disclose include a hotel's proprietary pricing and occupancy information.

What I find disappointed and depressing about the city of Los Angeles's arguments in this case is this sentence quoted from their petition:

"These laws expressly help police investigate crimes such as prostitution and gambling, capture dangerous fugitives and even authorize federal law enforcement to examine these registers, an authorization which can be vital in the immediate aftermath of a homeland terrorist attack." [emphasis added]

The government yet again brings out the terrorism boogeyman as an excuse to decimate our civil liberties.

Surely the outcome of this case must have some effect upon the pending cases against the NSA regarding its telephone metadata collection activities. In the past, a court has said that a search warrant is not necessary to obtain business records such as cellphone logs, although more recently another court has said that that warrantless collection of cell tower data is unconstitutional. The metadata the NSA was collecting and a hotel register are business records. Stay tuned to this channel, folks. This will be an interesting case to watch.

Links

  1. "mendax" - https://soylentnews.org/~mendax/
  2. "story that has civil liberties implications galore" - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/supreme-court-to-decide-if-cops-can-access-hotel-registries-without-warrants/
  3. "a court has said" - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/warrant-cell-phone_n_3678669.html
  4. "another court has said" - http://www.wired.com/2014/06/cell-tower-data-requires-warrant/

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