Someone is Tailing You
Brad Hoppmann | May 6, 2015 at 4:27 pm
Where were you at midnight last Thursday?
You might not remember, but somebody does. Mobile wireless providers track your phone’s location from their antenna towers.
Thanks to a little-noticed court ruling, the police can now demand that data any time they want. They don’t need a search warrant, either.
The FBI can literally trail everyone, at any time.
On the bright side, this may give the telecom companies a great new business opportunity. Will they seize it?
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Longtime readers know I’m a big civil liberties advocate. I think the government should keep its nose out of everyone’s business.
Last year, I wrote about an important Supreme Court ruling regarding smartphones being protected from any search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment (see Siri Pleads the Fifth, Thanks to the Fourth).
Many readers wrote in to cheer this decision.
Now, a lower court is again chipping away at our privacy. Here is a report from Business Insider.
The government doesn’t need a warrant to search cellphone tower location records, a federal appeals court in Atlanta has ruled.
In a potentially wide-ranging ruling, the court said that because cellphone owners technically “volunteer” their location to providers when they make phone calls, law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to track an individual’s location.
In 2010, law enforcement used cellphone locations to track and convict Quartavious Davis of armed robbery. Davis appealed, arguing that law enforcement had violated his Fourth Amendment rights by tracking his phone without a warrant.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals did not agree. In a majority decision, the court said law enforcement hadn’t violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures of property.
I have no sympathy for the person convicted in this case, but the Constitution is supposed to protect all of us.
The court’s reasoning is very, very disturbing. It goes way beyond phone location records.
Read again what the opinion said. By merely carrying a mobile phone, you “volunteer” your location to the phone company. Since you obviously don’t mind if the phone company knows where you are, the police can also see it without a warrant.
If that’s true, then what other information do you “volunteer” to the many companies that serve you? Just about everything you do could be fair game by such a standard.
A dissenting judge saw where this could lead.
“Nearly every website collects information about what we do when we visit,” Judge Beverly Martin said. “So now, under the majority’s rule, the Fourth Amendment allows the government to know from YouTube.com what we watch, or Facebook.com what we post or whom we “friend,” or Amazon.com what we buy, or Wikipedia.com what we research, or Match.com whom we date — all without a warrant.”
Thank you, Judge Martin. Too bad you were outvoted.
I’ll add another one to her list: every web site you visit.
After all, you “volunteer” that information to your internet provider when you type in a web address or click on a link.
So what is private anymore? Not much, apparently.
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Are there times when law enforcement legitimately needs this kind of information? Yes, of course.
The Constitution already gives police a way to do this.
All they have to do is show probable cause to a judge and get a search warrant. It’s a very simple process and doesn’t take long.
Getting a warrant is not too much to ask.
If this ruling stands, then local police and federal agencies can go on massive fishing expeditions through everyone’s data. The potential for abuse is breathtaking.
Imagine, for instance, if the IRS knows where you were every hour of every day, and decides to look at that data next time it audits you. Its varied uses are endless.
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As I said above, this could be an opportunity for the phone companies. Is there any technical reason they need to store my location data for months or years?
I don’t think so.
What we really need is for the Supreme Court to overturn this misguided ruling. Maybe they will — but they move so slowly it could take years.
Meanwhile, I would gladly pay an extra monthly fee to have them delete all my private information from their servers. I suspect many other people would, too.
However, we should not have to do this — the data should be private anyway. Yet, the government disagrees, so it’s up to us to defend our own privacy.
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Does this court decision bug you as much as it bugs me? Is it possible to keep your privacy without dropping out of society? I’d love to know what you think. You can leave a comment on our website or send me an e-mail.
Poster Comment:
It's not the FBI you should worry about, but the NSA.