New York Times: Growing Presence in the Courtroom: Cellphone Data as Witness
The New York Times reports on the increasing use of cellphone data as evidence in trials, and how sometimes the evidence is obtained without a warrant.
[There has been a] surge in law enforcement’s use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements.
But cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Existing laws do not provide clear or uniform guidelines: Federal wiretap laws, outpaced by technological advances, do not explicitly cover the use of cellphone data to pinpoint a person’s location, and local court rulings vary widely across the country.
In one case that unsettled cellphone companies, a sheriff in Alabama told a carrier he needed to track a cellphone in an emergency involving a child — she turned out to be his teenage daughter, who was late returning from a date. [...]
To track suspects in real time, law enforcement officials must ask a phone company to “ping,” or send a signal to, a phone; for the effort to succeed, the phone must be turned on, though it does not have to be in use. The police can then use a vehicle with signal-tracking equipment to narrow down the location.
The frequency and ease with which law enforcement agencies access cellphone data to track people is difficult to assess. Civil liberties groups recently obtained data from the Justice Department through a lawsuit showing that in some jurisdictions, including New Jersey and Florida, courts often allow federal prosecutors to track the location of cellphone users in real time without search warrants. [...]
Civil libertarians do not oppose using cellphone surveillance to solve crimes or save people in emergencies, but they worry that the legal gray area is enabling it to happen without much scrutiny or discussion. [...]
In the case being weighed in Pennsylvania, the Federal District Court in Pittsburgh ruled last year that a search warrant was required even for historical phone location records, which the government had requested to track a suspect in a drug case.
The decision upheld a magistrate judge’s ruling that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their physical location. Most Americans, the ruling said, do not know that their cellphones create a record of their movements and “would be appalled” to learn that the government can access it without showing probable cause.
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