Court allows warrantless cell location tracking

[Winehole23]

.

[ChuckD]

Eventually, crooks will learn to just put that on airplane mode until you need to make a call. They can't follow/track you if your antenna is turned off.

[ElNono]

Eventually, crooks will learn to just put that on airplane mode until you need to make a call. They can't follow/track you if your antenna is turned off.

Airplane mode is really not the proper way to do it, since it's a software stopgap. IE: The device can be programmed to merely display that it's in Airplane mode while it's really still transmitting.

That's why most savvy execs remove the batteries from their cellphones before going to any important meeting. They also leave their phones and batteries outside the room, since there has been cases where a mic and transmitter have been bundled inside the battery (by LE no less).

[LnGrrrR]

Airplane mode is really not the proper way to do it, since it's a software stopgap. IE: The device can be programmed to merely display that it's in Airplane mode while it's really still transmitting.

That's why most savvy execs remove the batteries from their cellphones before going to any important meeting. They also leave their phones and batteries outside the room, since there has been cases where a mic and transmitter have been bundled inside the battery (by LE no less).

This is also done in the military when entering sensitive rooms (Command Post for example, or NSA areas). The phone gets left outside.

[Winehole23]

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine's offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company's printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine's lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that's a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

But, in a story that's been in the making for over a year, and which we're exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year -- with the only difference being that, rather than "a printing press" and a "magazine," the story involved "a domain" and a "blog."

There are so many things about this story that are crazy, it's difficult to know where to start, so let's give the most important point first: The US government has effectively admitted that it totally screwed up and falsely seized & censored a non-infringing domain of a popular blog, having falsely claimed that it was taking part in criminal copyright infringement. Then, after trying to hide behind a totally secretive court process with absolutely no due process whatsoever (in fact, not even serving papers on the lawyer for the site or providing timely notifications -- or providing any do ents at all), for over a year, the government has finally realized it couldn't hide any more and has given up, and returned the domain name to its original owner. If you ever wanted to understand why ICE's domain seizures violate the law -- and why SOPA and PROTECT IP are almost certainly uncons utional -- look no further than what happened in this case.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-details.shtml

[Winehole23]

*crickets*

[LnGrrrR]

Not this charlatan. Lies from beginning to end, I hope his punk-ass is voted out in 2012. Go the way of Carter, bag.

I agree, but for who? Do you really think McCain would've been better? He would've just done it out in the open. We probably would be in four or five wars by now.

[Winehole23]

(too late, too drunk)

[Winehole23]

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said Friday he would demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about its domain seizure program known as Operation in Our Sites after it was revealed that the government kept a hip-hop music review site’s name for a year without affording the owner a chance to challenge the seizure.


Wyden also wants to know why there was no court record of the case, other than the initial seizure filing a year ago.


“I expect the administration will be receiving a series of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests from our office and that the senator will have very pointed questions with regard to how the administration chooses to target the sites that it does,” said Jennifer Hoelzer, a Wyden spokeswoman. She said the senator was “particularly interested in learning how many secret dockets exist for copyright cases. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious precedent or explanation for that.”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...omain-seizure/

[ElNono]

WH, I think you posted this in the wrong thread... the copyright war discussion is going on in the "next war on drugs" thread...

[Winehole23]

ok

[Winehole23]

cross posted at:

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...174882&page=12

[spursncowboys]

http://lifehacker.com/5867161/this-w...en-downloading

[Winehole23]

A Missouri federal judge ruled the FBI did not need a warrant to secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to a suspect’s car to track his public movements for two months.


The ruling, upholding federal theft and other charges, is one in a string of decisions nationwide supporting warrantless GPS surveillance. Last week’s decision comes as the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the issue within months in an unrelated case.


The ruling from Magistrate David Noce mirrored the Obama administration position before the Supreme Court during oral arguments on the topic in November. In short, defendant Fred Robinson, who was suspected of fudging his time sheets for his treasurer’s office job for the city of St. Louis, had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his public movements, Magistrate Noce said.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ps-monitoring/

[boutons_deux]

"no reasonable expectation of privacy in his public movements"

but police appear to have an unreasonable expectation of privacy (no pics, no vids) in their public handling of Human-Americans.

[Winehole23]

yep

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2...olice-illinois

[Creepn]

It's simple. If you're about to commit a crime, leave your cellphone elsewhere. Just pres. obama looking out for the little guys when we gotta steal from those damn richers.

[Winehole23]

tracking automobiles is also at issue here

[Winehole23]

New data from law enforcement agencies across the country has confirmed what EFF has long been afraid of: while police are routinely using cell phone location tracking information, only a handful of agencies are bothering to obtain search warrants.


Since 2005, we've been beating the drum loudly, warning that the government's attempts to track a person's physical location through their cell phone requires a search warrant. As we've said again and again, because cell phone tracking can give the government a snapshot of a person's life through their movements, a search warrant is necessary to safeguard against privacy intrusions.


Now new data -- obtained from a coordinated FOIA request by the ACLU -- shows just how pervasive cell phone tracking is throughout the United States. The ACLU obtained 5,500 pages of records from over 200 different law enforcement agencies. The records revealed that most law enforcement agencies are using location tracking information routinely, with only 10 out of the more than 200 claiming they had not tracked cell phones.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...n-data-without

[Winehole23]

All this gloom and doom can be fixed in two ways. First, courts need to recognize that the Fourth Amendment prohibits pervasive and sustained government surveillance unless the police get a search warrant. For centuries, the government's biggest limitation was technological; it was difficult - if not impossible - to follow a person for days at a time. But with surveillance tools becoming smaller and cheaper, its easier for the government to use surveillance information from our own cars to investigate mundane, non-violent crimes. The Fourth Amendment needs to keep up with the changes in technology in order for its longstanding privacy protections to have meaning.


Second, Congress needs to step up and update our electronic privacy laws. The law that governs cell phone location data - the Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA") - is more than 25 years old, enacted in a time where cell phones were far from ubiquitous. The law has been unable to keep up with the rapid technological changes that have occurred since 1986, and the conflicting court opinions on the cons utionality of warrantless cell phone location tracking noted above is the end result. It's time for Congress to reexamine the law and bring it in line with our expectations of privacy today.


You can do your part by getting informed and checking out the ACLU's location data map to figure out whether the cops where you live use location tracking data. Regardless of whether or not you live in a state where the cops track, you can tell Congress that its time to fix our broken and ancient technology laws by signing our action alert, and taking a stand to protect our locational privacy from the prying eyes of the government.

same

[Winehole23]

In November 2009, police officers in the state of Washington seized an iPhone belonging to suspected drug dealer Daniel Lee. While the phone was in police custody, a man named Shawn Hinton sent a text message to the device, reading, "Hey whats up dogg can you call me i need to talk to you." Suspecting that Hinton was looking to buy drugs from Lee, Detective Kevin Sawyer replied to the message, posing as Lee. With a series of text messages, he arranged to meet Hinton in the parking lot of a local grocery store—where Hinton was arrested and charged with attempted possession of heroin.


Hinton wasn't Sawyer's only target. According to a court decision summing up the facts, "Sawyer spent about 5 or 10 minutes looking at some of the text messages on the iPhone; he also looked to see who had been calling. Many of the text messages that Lee's iPhone had received and stored were from individuals who were seeking drugs from Lee."


So Sawyer texted one of the individuals on the list and asked him if he "needed more." The individual, Jonathan Roden, replied, "Yeah, that would be cool. I still gotta sum, but I could use some more. I prefer to just get a ball, so I'm only payin' one eighty for it, instead of two Ts for two hundred, that way." (The court helpfully explained that a "ball" is "a drug weight equivalent to approximately 3.5 grams.")


But can cops legally do this with seized cell phones? When their cases went to trial, Hinton and Roden both argued that Sawyer had violated their privacy rights by intercepting, without a warrant, private communications intended for Lee.
But in a pair of decisions, one of which was recently covered by Forbes, a Washington state appeals court disagreed. If the decisions, penned by Judge Joel Penoyar and supported by one of his colleagues, are upheld on appeal, they could have far-reaching implications for cell phone privacy.
"No longer private or deserving of cons utional protection"

"There is no long history and tradition of strict legislative protection of a text message sent to, displayed, and received from its intended destination, another person's iPhone," Penoyar wrote in his decision. He pointed to a 1990 case in which the police seized a suspected drug dealer's pager as an example. The officers observed which phone numbers appeared on the pager, called those numbers back, and arranged fake drug purchases with the people on the other end of the line.


A federal appeals court held that the pager owner's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were not violated because the pager is "nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers," akin to an address book. The court also held that someone who sends his phone number to a pager has no reasonable expectation of privacy because he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner.


Judge Penoyar said that the same reasoning applies to text messages sent to an iPhone. While text messages may be legally protected in transit, he argued that they lose privacy protections once they have been delivered to a target device in the hands of the police. He claimed that the same rule applied to letters and e-mail. (Police would still need to seize or search a phone or computer legally, and phones are much easier for cops to seize than computers, which generally require a warrant.)


"On his own iPhone, on his own computer, or in the process of electronic transit, Hinton's communications are shielded by our cons utions," he wrote, referring to both the state and federal cons utions. "But after their arrival, Hinton's text messages on Lee's iPhone were no longer private or deserving of cons utional protection." Penoyar rejected Roden's privacy arguments on similar grounds.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...rsonate-owner/

[ElNono]

http://spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=201439

[Winehole23]

ah thx

[Galileo]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20015743-281.html

The FBI and other police agencies don't need a search warrant to track the locations of Americans' cell phones, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday in a precedent-setting decision.

In the first decision of its kind, a Philadelphia appeals court agreed with the Obama administration that no search warrant--signed by a judge based on a belief that there was probable cause to suspect criminal activity--was necessary for police to obtain logs showing where a cell phone user had traveled.

A three-judge panel of the Third Circuit said (PDF) tracking cell phones "does not require the traditional probable-cause determination" enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits government agencies from conducting "unreasonable" searches. The court's decision, however, was focused on which federal privacy statutes apply.

But the panel sided with civil-liberties groups on an important point: it agreed that, in at least some cases, judges may require investigators to obtain a search warrant. That is, however, "an option to be used sparingly," the court said.

Some questions are likely to be resolved in future proceedings, once the case returns to a lower court. "It is still an open question as to whether the Fourth Amendment applies to cell phone records," Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston said after the ruling. "This decision does not definitively answer the question of the Fourth Amendment status of cell phone [location records]."

In this case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan denied the Justice Department's attempt to obtain stored location data without a search warrant, saying federal privacy law prohibited it. Lenihan's ruling, in effect, would require police to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause--a more privacy-protective standard.

The Obama administration had argued that warrantless tracking is permissible because Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers said "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Lenihan had required the Justice Department to demonstrate "probable cause," a standard used in search warrants. But the three-judge panel rejected that idea, saying Lenihan "erred" and the relevant requirement is a "lesser one than probable cause" that is less privacy-protective.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, had told Lenihan that it needed historical (meaning stored, not future) phone location information because a set of suspects "use their wireless telephones to arrange meetings and transactions in furtherance of their drug-trafficking activities." The name of the mobile-service provider is not public.

The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology had argued (PDF) that because cell phone information "is protected by the Fourth Amendment," a search warrant was necessary. The court did not squarely address that question in Tuesday's ruling.

EFF's Bankston said it was encouraging to see a ruling that allowed judges to demand search warrants at least in some cases. "The court explicitly refused to set a boundary for the court's discretion," he said. "It clarifies that judges have the discretion that the government has long argued they don't have."

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions from CNET about whether it would appeal that portion of the ruling to the Supreme Court or seek a review from the Third Circuit.

Not long ago, the concept of tracking cell phones would have been the stuff of spy movies. In 1998's "Enemy of the State," Gene Hackman warned that the National Security Agency has "been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the '40s--they've infected everything." After a decade of appearances in "24" and "Live Free or Die Hard," location tracking has become such a trope that it was satirized in a scene with Seth Rogen from "Pineapple Express" (2008).

Cell phone tracking comes in two forms: police obtaining retrospective historical data kept by mobile providers for their own billing purposes that is typically not very detailed, or prospective tracking--which CNET was the first to report in a 2005 article--that reveals the minute-by-minute location of a handset or mobile device.

The Obama administration argues that no search warrant is necessary; it says what's needed is only a 2703(d) order, which requires law enforcement to show that the records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

I thought Obama was in favor of civil liberties?

[boutons_deux]

And if the dealer erases his phone's call log and phone book, the police can get his call logs from the cell phone carriers.