{"id":14473,"date":"2016-04-14T17:50:33","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T22:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=14473"},"modified":"2016-04-14T17:50:33","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T22:50:33","slug":"surveillance-state-no-warrant-required-for-phone-location-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/04\/14\/surveillance-state-no-warrant-required-for-phone-location-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Surveillance State: No Warrant Required for Phone Location Records"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are getting closer and closer to full scale Legal Federal monitoring of ALL cellular devices folks. Every day the Feds are chipping away the 4th Amendment a little at a time. In a few years it will be non-existent..all in the name Of “National Security”.-SF<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"cell\"<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Federal agents can obtain cellphone records that reveal a caller\u2019s location without a warrant, a Cincinnati-based federal appeals court said on Wednesday in the latest ruling<\/a>to tackle the scope of privacy protections for data transmitted by personal devices.<\/p>\n

The records obtained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from wireless carriers in 2011 showed that two Detroit men were near the scene of several robberies at the time they were committed. Timothy Carpenter and Timothy Sanders, who were ultimately convicted of participation in nine armed robberies, sought to exclude the records, saying they were protected by the Fourth Amendment.<\/p>\n

A 2-1 panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that location records created when a mobile phone connects to a nearby cell tower were the equivalent of the writing on the outside of an envelope, rather than the letter inside.<\/p>\n

\u201cCell-site data\u2014like mailing addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses\u2014are information that facilitate personal communications, rather than part of the content of those communications themselves,\u201d wrote Judge Raymond Kethledge. \u201cThe government\u2019s collection of business records containing these data therefore is not a search.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judge\u00a0Jane\u00a0Branstetter\u00a0Stranch joined the ruling in part but was skeptical of lumping location records together with bank and credit card records that law enforcement officers can retrieve from financial firms without a warrant.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis case involves tracking physical location through cell towers and a personal phone, a device routinely carried on the individual\u2019s person,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI am not convinced that the situation before us can be addressed appropriately with a test primarily used to obtain business records such as credit card purchases.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harold Gurewitz, a lawyer for Mr. Carpenter, said he and his client were considering their next move. They could ask the Sixth Circuit to rehear the case or petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review it. Until the high court steps in, Mr.\u00a0Gurewitz said, \u201cI think the issue is just going to be unclear.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Detroit, which prosecuted the case,\u00a0declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The ruling aligns the Sixth Circuit with two other regional appeals courts and means that law enforcement officers in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee can obtain a court order for location data by showing merely that the records are relevant to an ongoing investigation. A warrant requires a showing of probable cause.<\/p>\n

A three-judge panel of a fourth federal appeals court\u00a0ruled in August<\/a> that police need a warrant to obtain such records. That ruling is under review by the full court.<\/p>\n

In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has erred on the side of privacy in disputes over whether the Fourth Amendment protects against the installation of a global positioning system tracker on a suspect\u2019s vehicle or a search of his phone during an arrest.<\/p>\n

But Judge Kethledge said he was bound a\u00a01979 ruling in\u00a0Smith v. Maryland<\/a>\u00a0in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the numbers dialed by a caller on a landline aren\u2019t protected by the Fourth Amendment, because the caller knowingly gives that information to phone companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe same things are true as to the locational information here,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAny cellphone user who has seen her phone\u2019s signal strength fluctuate must know that, when she places or receives a call, her phone \u2018exposes\u2019 its location to the nearest cell tower and thus to the company that operates the tower.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cell records obtained by the FBI showed that Mr. Carpenter and his half brother, Mr. Sanders, were nearby the scene of four robberies in Warren, Ohio, and Detroit in 2010 and 2011.<\/p>\n

Mr. Carpenter was sentenced to more than 116 years in prison, while Mr. Sanders was sentenced to about 14 years.<\/p>\n

Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief on behalf of Messrs. Carpenter and Sanders, said the ruling failed to account for the privacy violations made possible by devices that \u201cwe all need to carry around to live our lives normally.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on, \u201cWhen police obtain months\u2019 worth of cell phone data comprising thousands of individual locations, like they did in this case, they should have to get a search warrant from a judge,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Read the Original Article at Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are getting closer and closer to full scale Legal Federal monitoring of ALL cellular devices folks. Every day the Feds are chipping away the 4th Amendment a little at a time. In a few years it will be non-existent..all in the name Of “National Security”.-SF Federal agents can obtain cellphone records that reveal a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2805,74,1928,3553,65,3712],"tags":[11225,3083,11226,11227,11228,11229,3022],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}