US Court Says No Warrant Needed For Cellphone Location Data (reuters.com) 147
Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: Police do not need a warrant to obtain a person's cellphone location data held by wireless carriers, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a setback to privacy advocates. The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, voted 12-3 that the government can get the information under a decades-old legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company. The ruling overturns a divided 2015 opinion from the court's three-judge panel and reduces the likelihood that the Supreme Court would consider the issue. The decision arose from several armed robberies in Baltimore and Baltimore County, Maryland, in early 2011, leading to the convictions of Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan. The convictions were based in part on 221 days of cellphone data investigators obtained from wireless provider Sprint, which included about 29,000 location records for the defendants, according to the appeals court opinion.
As JC said. (Score:2, Funny)
Leave your phone at home son, when you take your guns to town.
Time to read the 4th (Score:5, Insightful)
The fourth amendment says nothing about "third parties." Not one word.
This is just more judicial activism continuing to bite the citizens in the posterior.
Reasonable = probable cause, oath or affirmation, description(s) of place to be searched and item(s) to be seized, which allow for a warrant to be issued. Anything else = UNreasonable.
Anything the justices say to the contrary is in direct violation of their oath of office.
Not that there's any surprise in that.
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Don't pay the cell bill, joke is on them.
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This isn't about the carrier, it's about asking for the GPS data that's sent to an app being handed over by a app owner who wants to help police.
Re:Time to read the 4th (Score:5, Insightful)
Police: Can you give us your location data for all your users?
Webmaster: Sure.
Court: Valid information sharing...
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And this workflow has likely been automated to happen at every-few-minutes intervals. And let's not forget storing historical data. Technology is truly empowering the powertripping-kind.
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Police: Can you give us your location data for all your users?
Webmaster: Sure.
Court: Valid information sharing...
On the other hand - if the police have to get a warrant every time, then so would the emergency services. Personally, I wouldn't to wade through red tape if I was in a serious accident and didn't know the location; or if I was calling for help while hiding from an ongoing attack. I'd just want them to get on with finding me ASAP.
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Emergency services doesn't need a warrant to break into your house now, firemen are even traditionally pictured with an axe, just to chop down your door and save your life if your house is burning down.
Nothing wrong with the info being made available in life threatening situations for the purpose of saving a life, just don't troll through the data and use it for criminal investigations.
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Correct, it does not. That doesn't mean third parties can't be used to provide evidence. This would be no different than police back in the 40s asking people in the area of the robberies if they saw anything suspicious and tracking the criminals that way.
In this case the police asked a third party, who may have had knowledge of the whereabouts of the criminals, if they could help out.
As too many people, such as yourself,
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Our digital data are our "effects". Not theirs.
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Not when it is supplied to a third party, in this case Sprint.
Sprint was fully within their rights to provide the data they owned to the cops.
Your location, supplied to Sprint via your phone, became Sprint's "effects" and not yours.
Re:Time to read the 4th (Score:5, Insightful)
Not when it is supplied to a third party, in this case Sprint.
You could say the same thing about data shared with your doctor, your bank, or your lawyer. Disclosing information to a 3rd party does not make it "theirs".
There is a simple test for whether the police need a warrant: Would a normal citizen have legal access to the information? If anyone can go to a cell carrier and get location data on anyone else, then the police should be able to do the same. Otherwise, they should need a warrant.
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Yup, Shanghai Bob is mistaken
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Except you're wrong, there IS a law against disclosure of this VERY information, see here https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/222.
Now, it would be up to you to find a law that authorizes law enforcement to get this information without a warrant, which I doubt there is because then we wouldn't have conflicting rulings in various courts nor would this court have to rely on '3rd party data sharing precedent'.
In fact the I referenced is so directly on point that I find it incredible that any court could
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Please show me where I can opt out of 'disclosing' this information.
If you're forced to do something to access a service, have no say over the terms and conditions of said service, and are functionally crippled in modern society without the service, you'll have a hard time making the case that you shouldn't have some extraordinary protections against people abusing the resulting aspects of the service.
That the court could even keep a straight face when calling the disclosure voluntary (which is the crux of
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So now the authorities can get this information with nothing but a phone call, but 911 still can't get your cell phone location in an emergency.
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Sort of but wrong. The court is wrong to because of the neccesity of this data in connection to facilitating calls. It is the same reasons why the supreme court has already ruled they need a warrant for a pen register, trap and trace and US law has required it since 1968. It is trivial to get a warrant for this though. It also provides penalties for disclosure of this information outside of a lawful intercept or to one of the parties of the call. But the principle is the same because the GPS information i
Re:Time to read the 4th (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the police generally cannot compel 3rd parties to stand on the street, making a note of every non-homeless person on the street, and then DEMAND their notes. That's what happens here. Sprint et al aren't volunteering this data they're being serviced with a non-warrant court order, an NSL, or whatever. It's EXACTLY the sort of police state that the 4th amendment is designed to halt.
Hell, the cell carriers would not even be storing this data, which is useless to them, if they weren't forced to do so. They need to know location for cell tower purposes, but once you're in a new zone, the old zones aren't useful. Except, of course, for the spying bullshit.
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You seriously need to take a law class on privacy or find a lawyer and have a few beers with him/her but here you go I'll offer this for free.
1) Your '40s example isn't close to being the same. First you have no expectatation of privacy in a public place nor have you taken out any services from individuals 'in the area of the robbery' that would imply or specifically relate that you had any expectation of privacy.
2) The police asking 'did you see anything suspicious' is not about an INDIVIDUAL. A better ana
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The fourth amendment also doesn't say anything about Wednesday being Prince Spaghetti day, but that doesn't mean it isn't.
Here's what the fourth amendment says, specifically:
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I have always wondered why the most insightful comments in a thread here on Slashdot are usually at the very bottom of the thread. :-(
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The fourth amendment says nothing about "third parties." Not one word.
Nor does it really say anything about surveillance or privacy, only searches and seizures. What third parties record is not your private information, if the cops want to see a store's surveillance tapes that's up to the store owner not the people on the tape. When you dial a phone number you're volunteering the information to the phone company, nobody's accessing it by force. A search means accessing what's behind closed doors and sealed containers, if a cop wanders by your yard and you grow pot in plain si
What part of "Tracfone" do you not understand? (Score:3)
TracFone is the company behind many of the cell phone carriers: TracFone, NET10 Wireless, Total Wireless, Straight Talk, SafeLink Wireless, Telcel América, Simple Mobile, and Page Plus Cellular. As has been said, a cellphone is a tracking device that also makes phone calls.
Why do you think Apple bought the electronic device rights to Liquid Metal Technology then never built a phone out of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Clearly, they saw how google had become a tracking company and they needed
Why would this make it less likely that the SC wou (Score:4, Insightful)
The ruling overturns a divided 2015 opinion from the court's three-judge panel and reduces the likelihood that the Supreme Court would consider the issue.
Why would this make it less like that the SC would consider the issue? From a google search of stories on Slashdot, I see courts ruling differently on this issue in several jurisdictions. That seems to solidify that the Supreme Court would take this up.
Slashdot stories on cellphone location data rulings [google.com]. Here are 3 cases where courts ruled differently than today's ruling. The US 4th district doesn't include Florida, for example, which ruled otherwise.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Except whoops, the Supreme court is neutered right now and can't make any decisions... :-(
SCOTUS size (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't neutered. They simply are able to deadlock. Doesn't mean they will, or have to.
There's no set size for the court. It's been larger, and it's been smaller. It's been even numbered and it's been odd numbered.
Doesn't much matter anyway. They do whatever they want. We're long past them actually paying any attention to the oaths they swore.
Re:SCOTUS size (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it's worth noting that they made it the law that your phone HAD to give out location information. 911 and all that.
So:
step 1: force phones to give up location
step 2: claim that because phone location is given up, it's not subject to the 4th
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4-4 ties haven't happened yet... most SCotUS decisions come 8-0 lately.
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The court has already announced that it was deadlocked in an important case concerning public sector unions as well as two others.
Source: CNN [cnn.com]
Each time they deadlocked, they decided to do something else instead. It also is refusing to accept controversial cases.
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Considering (Score:2)
Re: Considering (Score:1)
I carry a box of Sim cards to switch it up, select a random imei number on boot, and feed in gps data that says I'm at the north pole. Just for fun.
it's a radio signal (Score:4, Informative)
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It's encrypted, but if you're sending your location to every app you installed, they need only one app owner to handover everything.
What does this have to do with apps? (Score:1)
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Can you name a few apps that don't use GPS?
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So are voter registrations but the government isn't supposed to use them to decide if you get your Social Security Check this month. Just because the Gov't can track you doesn't me they are allowed to.
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So are voter registrations but the government isn't supposed to use them to decide if you get your Social Security Check this month.
Just wait. It's simply a matter of "..they haven't done so yet...as far as we know."
They've already been caught using the IRS against political activists/organizations/citizens' groups, and spying on journalists' private communications and even on members of Congress' communications, so it's not tinfoil-hattery.
Interesting to note that they only halted the spying on members of Congress when the threat of retaliatory budget cuts was raised.
Maybe it's finally time to cross the Rubicon on a mass tax-revolt, as
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It's important to note that after the IRS was caught fucking over tea party organizations, not one of the tea-party darlings in Congress floated a bill to cut off or otherwise reduce the IRS's power to fuck with political organizations. This is clearly a power that the tea partiers wish the IRS to have.
It's also important to note that politicians who claim to be tea party types are not necessarily representative of the regular-Joe working-man tea party guy who believes in lower taxes, no bail-outs, and less federal government.
Politicians lie to get elected.
Shocking, I know, after the example set by the current POTUS of all the promises to his political base he has been so diligent in keeping.
Oh, wait...
Strat
So is copper (Score:2)
The difference between a copper line phone call and a cellular signal is frequency and strength. In fact it is much easier to tap a copper line than it is to break encryption or to collect phone call metadata.
The legal principle should be whether the parties have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you make an encrypted phone call do you expect a third party to be able to listen to your conversation? Is it lawful for you to intercept an encrypted phone call? Can a third party casually intercept and de
No surprise (Score:1)
Kangaroo Court wipes ass with Constitution, declares plebs have no rights, encourages regime to press ahead with #badlaws. News at 11!
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AFAIK, apps that request location data have a right to keep that data as long as they want, and they can hand it off to police all they want. It doesn't matter what the carrier does with its copy, you have a mess of apps trying to enable the location data.
Why not get a warrant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that they were investigating armed robberies, why on Earth didn't they just get a warrant instead of spending all that taxpayer money fighting court cases to be able to do so without getting a warrant?
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The point of this case is that if the policeman asks for the data, and the app owner hands it over, that's not a violation. They need a warrant to force that handover, but if the app owner is willing to co-operate without a warrant, that's still fair play and they get to use that data in court.
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So, true. There was a decision the other day on a similar situation.
Cop: We are going to arrest you. Do you want an Attorney?
Suspect: "Well, I'm really screwed now." "Yes, I want an Attorney"
Judge/Appeals Court: All statements prior to "Yes, I want an Attorney" are fully admissible
Suspect: "Well, I'm really screwed now"
Sunny and Warm by the Beach
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Setting precedent via an (ostensibly) easy win?
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Because they didn't need a warrant. Teh location data doesn't belong to the cell phone user and the data isn't stored on a systems that are owned by the user. The police quite rightly believe that all they need is a subpoena to compel the wireless provider to turn over their records.
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Given that they were investigating armed robberies, why on Earth didn't they just get a warrant instead of spending all that taxpayer money fighting court cases to be able to do so without getting a warrant?
Because now they will never need to do paperwork to get a warrant again.
See, they are saving YOU money through efficiency increases!
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because it's not about doing justice in general let alone in those specific cases
it's about battering down our rights without most of us noticing
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It's not about armed robberies, it about skipping judge control.
They are using YOUR money to get THEM full liberty to scan YOUR communications. They expect you to buy it as "to protect you from criminals"
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Why are Democrats fucking children now? :(
alibi (Score:1)
Does that mean if I leave my cell phone at home while committing a crime I can now use that as an alibi?
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Don't forget to remove the GPS chip that's hidden in your car...
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They don't need GPS tracking... all those traffic cameras feed into license plate and facial recognition systems.
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Where's the camera on the desert highways of NV?
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you didn't notice the cactus growing so close to the road? (just kidding)
I do big data for a living... Just put the camera at the last point of entry / exit and compare pictures. Average vehicle speed (computed from distance between cameras and time of day). A stock photo database of all common cars will easily tie the make and model. Cross reference the vehicle registration database to confirm name and address of registered owner. Retrieve DMV (secure id) photo of all licensed drivers in the house
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Ummmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, voted 12-3 that the government can get the information under a decades-old legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company
... with whom I have a contract that ought to contain privacy terms and a disclaimer than certain information may be provided to law enforcement only under due legal process, i.e. a warrant.
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OUGHT to, perhaps... but does it?
Not much recourse if it doesn't, and no competing providers have such terms either.
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Then you may have a course of action against the wireless company - perhaps a partial refund of past payments or something like that. However, that wouldn't get the evidence excluded from your criminal trial.
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Yeah - that's what I came here to ask. I am NOT disclosing this to the 3rd Party. THEY are compiling this data on me.
How would I stop disclosing this information to the 3rd Party?
And is the phone company really a third party in this case? I have purchased a service contract through them - seems they are a First party. It isn't like my phone operates independently and I flip a switch that says "share with phone company." no no - it is all part of the system that they built, a side-effect of their tec
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Even if you have such a contract, it's worthless because you have no legal recourse if they violate the terms.
Remember the whole "telecom immunity" debate? In the 2008 "FISA Revisions Act" the federal government granted telecom companies total immunity(retroactive and future) from any civil or criminal liabilities stemming from their sharing of our data with the federal government.
They don't have to tell you that they gave your data to Big Brother and even if you somehow found out, you would not be able to
It's NOT a "third party" (Score:5, Interesting)
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It wouldn't bother me as much if I could get the same information about my own cellphone from verizon as the police apparently can.
As it is if I want to be able to find my phone I have to use a 3rd party service as verizon won't go as far as telling me what country my phone is currently in.
Another way this happened, which /. users support (Score:2, Troll)
There are two different legal theories used to justify this. There is the third-party approach, and the business records approach. Around half of Slashdot commenters actively support the business records excuse, whether or not they realize it.
Government passes law saying that carriers must _____ (provide good service in the sticks, hire enough black people, whatever), liberals cheer.
Goverment inspects carrier's call/personnel records to ensure that the _______ (carrier has good service in BFE/hired enough
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You forgot the part where carriers are ordered (CALEA) to provide support for surveillance. Kind of a HUGE omission.
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Pretty easy, you are the first party, the government is the second party, the phone company is the third party.
While this is a law issue in that the law allows this, the courts are just upholding the law, want it changed you need to have congress change the law.
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Exactly correct.
Disclosure cannot be instantaneous and automatic. It must be the result of the acting will of a person for each and every case. The only way to prove that it was an act of the person's will is for a pause in which the person can choose to act in such a way as to prevent the disclosure.
The argument that a person could stop what they are doing and turn off their phone at any given point is not relevant.
The telephone company is, by the implication of the contract with the customer, party to the
Definition of a "third party" (Score:2)
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Third Party Doctrine (Score:1)
Oh, are you just now realizing that your telephone company regularly helps the government spy on you?
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Hardly the point.
The telephone company and the government are essentially the same entity and are trying to strip you of your humanity and incorporate the aspects of you which are of interest to them.
Fascism Alive and Well (Score:3)
knowingly and willingly surrender information ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sorry, cell phones are not a necessity. Food, water, and shelter are necessities. Cell phones are a luxury, and notably lower on the totem pole than refrigeration, running water, and sewage treatment. If you decide you have to have a cell phone on hand you can always remove the battery while not actively using it, or you could keep it in a shielded container to prevent it constantly reporting. I'm sure you could also open up the phone if you really wanted to and remove/modify the GPS chip, although the poli
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This is the same argument that the government makes about the no fly list ("Flying is not a right, and you can always walk, drive, take a boat, or go fuck yourself hard enough that the force thereof will accelerate you to near light speed and you'll get there faster than the plane would"). Let me rephrase it for you: "You can have all of the rights guaranteed to you by the constitution, as long as you choose not to participate in the modern world."
That argument might work for the Amish, but it sure as hell
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I'm not for the government on this issue, or the no fly list, I'm just pointing out that cell phones are not a necessity. I've owned cell phones on and off over the years and while very convenient, they are by no means necessary for modern life. Comically enough though, I know practicing Amish folks that do use cell phones. It depends on the particular Amish community, but the apparent prohibition on electricity stems from a prohibition on having wires entering the home. Using cell phones avoids the need fo
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I'm not for the government on this issue, or the no fly list, I'm just pointing out that cell phones are not a necessity.
I tend to agree in principle, but I would point out that they CAN be necessities. When you job, for example, requires you to have one so you are reachable after hours. This is no longer a "luxury."
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If you're carrying an operating cell phone, you're willingly surrendering location information to your provider. The reason there's no way to disable the location notification and keep the phone on is that that's not how cell phones work. The provider knows which tower you're talking to when you're on the phone, and has to know which tower can reach you if you're to get incoming calls.
Once someone else has information about you, it's their information (in the US, anyway), and the Fourth Amendment doesn
This is what Slashdotters supported when they... (Score:1)
voted for Obama and cheered as Harry Reid [newyorker.com] exercised the "nuclear option" [washingtonpost.com] to eliminate Republican filibusters in the Senate in 2013. The specific point of that action was to pack the federal courts of appeals that cover the DC area (and thus are the ones that rule on cases challenging the power of the federal government over individuals) with "progressive" judges. Obama and Reid were absolutely committed to packing the 4th circuit and they did it. The Republicans had been using the filibuster to prevent that
third party? (Score:2)
How could anyone interpret the phone company being a 3rd party in such a case? I'd say they are the 1st party, maybe I could even be convinced that they are the 2nd party (the user being the 1st), but 3rd? The phone company is the first party to get and possess the location information, it comes though their infrastructure, it's in their database, they handle the information, and they can provide it to the
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Exactly my opinion. If a carrier is ordered by the government to provide surveillance (CALEA) , they become an extension of the government and must firewall off any collected information. This must be true otherwise the sunshine the NSA has been peddling would be a lie.
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In this type of analysis, the person being charged is the "1st" party and the police is the "2nd" party. Anyone else is a "3rd" party.
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The phone company is a 3rd party because they have no standing to challenge the court or agency order based on the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment remedy is suppression which does not apply for the 3rd party either and the actual person being charged cannot argue that until they are in court.
This cannot be "3rd Party" (Score:1)
A simple fact that the courts have missed is that wireless carriers are not third parties. CALEA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] gets in the way, and should have been a HUGE stop sign. There is no possible way that you can misconstrue a carrier as a third party when they are ordered to provide surveillance capabilities to the government. (and most sensible people read that statute as requiring a warrant to request the data/metadata )
It would be Sunny here by the Beach, but too many drones and black he
This was a triumph (Score:2)
I'm making a note here: Huge Success
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
Citizen activism is an option (Score:1)
Ignoble scope creep (Score:2)
Those judges will think different once they realize that they're "disclosing" all their DNA-laden dead skin cells to their Asian laundry service—they argue in some tonal language that DNA sequencing abets selection of the optimal detergent enzymes—and "disclosing" their DNA-laden saliva at the local Mexican diner—they argue in Spanish that DNA sequencing abets selection of the optimal flavour molecules—and all those other white-privilege leaks that Donald's silly wall won't fix.
It's
gerneral warrent. Just get a real warrent crown (Score:2)
No warrant needed? (Score:2)
Well alright, if the cops don't need a warrant to go find the location data from anyone's cell phone, then neither do I.
Gimme the past 2 years of movement of Trump, Clinton, and Sanders. And the names and paths of all those who intersected them within 30 feet for more than an hour.
Let me see who has visited the white house in the past decade, and what rooms they went into.
When have the paths of two congressmen crossed for more than 20 minutes outside of congress? Hell, let's throw CEOs in that search as w