Posted on 11/29/2017 12:07:41 PM PST by Coronal
The Supreme Court on Wednesday morning will hear arguments in a major privacy controversy about police tracking people through their cellphones that may bring about permanent changes to how the courts interpret the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
At issue in Carpenter v. United States is the constitutionality of police's warrantless search and seizure of a cellphone user’s records to uncover that person’s location and movements.
The government obtained location data in 2011 on Timothy Carpenter, a suspected criminal in Detroit, without getting a warrant. Carpenter appealed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the government did not need a warrant. Carpenter’s lawyer and the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Supreme Court to hear Carpenter’s case, and the justices agreed to do so in June.
The Carpenter case is one of the most anticipated cases of the high court’s current term in the technology and legal sectors. The U.S. Public Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest computing professional society, said Tuesday it “considers this [case] a watershed moment” with “the legality of potentially indiscriminate government surveillance” at stake.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
It better come back, NO
They had enough evidence to convict without it.
If it comes back yes that means anything on your cell phone is admissible and can be grabbed by anybody at any time for any reason.
“...the constitutionality of police’s warrantless search and seizure of a cellphone user’s records to uncover that person’s location and movements. “
An employee where I worked was murdered. The police asked the cell phone companies for the records of what cell phones had been in his house. They had the purps in hours. Two under age prostitutes had participated in a setup by their pimps. They texted that the victim was naked and unarmed. The pimps broke in and shot him nine times.
How many convictions will be thrown out because the Supremes decide one way or another?
My take: Police aren’t entitled to the information on our private devices without a warrant. However, cobbling together available company data is just good police work. If someone witnesses someone in the area where a crime is committed, that is admissible. Cell towers can be that witness as easily as public cameras can.
If they rule against the use of company data in this fashion because of privacy concerns, they may be ruling against other types of data like surveillance cameras and traffic light cams.
It’s not quite that simple. Cellphones operate on commercial networks that track every phone by definition. Using a cellphone means you agree to use independent networks and grant them an identifying connection. The fact that you made such a connection is a matter of record—record that you do not possess, but were a willing party. It requires no “wire tapping” or any type of active surveillance.
There is no conflict when a person voluntarily contracts to abridge one’s rights. If it’s mandatory, it becomes an issue of rights, but when one “opts in” by purchasing such a product, crying wolf seems a bit much. That said, a warrant should be required to access any such records and doesn’t seem an onerous requirement.
Anyone have an update? Did this happen today?
It’s not quite that simple.
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All they needed was a search warrant. It is that simple.
Many networks have made it a policy to allow government agencies to see their records under certain conditions. Calling it a search and seizure wouldn’t be accurate if police asked the network and the network said yes. If they said no, then it would have needed a warrant (which didn’t happen here).
If someone wants a network that doesn’t do this, fine. But that network might find itself the home of a lot of shady activity.
Now the devil is in the details, but this might have just been a matter of network policy. In which case the court is likely to say that networks may have such policies.
Cell phone records are the property of the service provide as requested.
With regard to the records there are no privacy issues. The records are not the property of the cell phone user.
The service provider can be asked to turn them over and can do so. If there is provider resistance, there can be a warrant that ultimately costs the provider money. So, as a matter of economics, it is policy to turn over the records
If you want to be secretive, don’t use your cell phone
It looks to me like the network wanted to allow it.
I don’t know every possible way how one would get around that. If there was enough pressure, maybe networks might allow individual subscribers to opt into a provision of “suppress revealing my records without a warrant.”
And perhaps that is how it should be among private entities. Don’t want to do business with a fishbowl? Go elsewhere or negotiate in blocs with the fishbowl keeper. Don’t beg government to give you a law to require it, because we know how these things go. An “A” act has a way of becoming a “ways to restrict A” act.
Yeah... this looks like next to a nothingburger to me if this is what went down.
The court is essentially having to decide if having such a policy is OK.
I’d rather it not be activist, and say yes, it’s OK. Now the onus moves to the private sphere.
—— “suppress revealing my records without a warrant.”-—
In so doing, the subscriber must also agree to bear up front the costs associated with the legal work associated with forcing the warrant
It isn’t very onerous legally or otherwise to utter the words “show me a warrant”.
“How many convictions will be thrown out because the Supremes decide one way or another?”
That really would be the fault of police who failed to perform their duties according to the Constitution, not the Supreme Court.
If the LEO needs a warrant to tap your phone they need the same to track your movements via cell tower data. It should not matter who owns the data. There is an expectation of privacy here.
US v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012)
"We hold that the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search.” "
Indeed it did. You'll find the transcript here. Pretty interesting reading. I'm halfway through at the moment. When you stop to think about some of the stuff being considered here, the implications of it are staggering. In the particular case at issue, the government got location and related information from a cell-phone company for 127 days. Other cases were mentioned where the government got over 450 consecutive days worth of data for a single suspect.
One interesting point brought up was that there is no law requiring cell phone companies retain this data. If we really lived in a free company, at least one cellphone provider would be selling their product based on the fact that they only keep information on hand for 30 days, or whatever is required for accurate billing records to be cut.
Personally, much like police cameras, if they are to be used, before asking about anything in their content, all parties should be given complete, equal access. Without equal access, there is no justice.
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