GPS World

Tag: U.S. Supreme Court

  • U.S. Supreme Court requires warrants for cellphone location data

    U.S. Supreme Court requires warrants for cellphone location data

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 22 that the government needs a warrant to access a person’s cellphone location history.

    In the case Carpenter v. United States, the American Civil Liberties Union represented a man who had months of his cellphone location information turned over to law enforcement without a warrant. Investigators received the cell tower records with a court order that requires a lower standard than the “probable cause” needed to obtain a warrant.

    The court found in a 5-to-4 decision that obtaining such information is a search under the Fourth Amendment and that a warrant from a judge based on probable cause is required.

    “This is a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights in the digital age,” said ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, who argued the case before the court last November. “The Supreme Court has given privacy law an update that it has badly needed for many years, finally bringing it in line with the realities of modern life.

    “The government can no longer claim that the mere act of using technology eliminates the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Today’s decision rightly recognizes the need to protect the highly sensitive location data from our cell phones, but it also provides a path forward for safeguarding other sensitive digital information in future cases — from our emails, smart home appliances, and technology that is yet to be invented.”

    Case background

    In 2011, without getting a probable cause warrant, the government obtained from cell service companies months’ worth of phone location records for suspects in a robbery investigation in Detroit. For one suspect, Timothy Carpenter, the records covered 127 days and revealed 12,898 separate points of location data. Police seek these kinds of cellphone location records from phone companies tens of thousands of times each year.

    After Carpenter was convicted at trial, based in part on the cellphone location evidence, he appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 2–1 that no warrant is required under the Fourth Amendment.

    The Supreme Court said in its opinion today, “We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information. In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection. The government’s acquisition of the cell-site records here was a search under that amendment.”

    Tech companies and media weigh in

    Among the many friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case is the one from technology companies, which was signed by Google, Facebook, Apple, Verizon, Twitter, Cisco, Microsoft and others. They echoed the ACLU’s arguments, writing that “Fourth Amendment doctrine must adapt to the changing realities of the digital era” and that “Rigid analog-era rules should yield to consideration of reasonable expectations of privacy in the digital age.”

    In another friend-of-the-court brief, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 19 other media organizations warned of the chilling effect on First Amendment freedoms that can result from easy law enforcement access to the location information of reporters and their sources.

    Third-party doctrine

    The government’s argument was based on the “third-party doctrine,” which the government reads to provide that by sharing information or records with a “third party” such as a business, a person gives up any reasonable expectation that the information will remain private. The doctrine was established in Supreme Court cases from the 1970s, which reasoned that without an expectation of privacy, there is no Fourth Amendment protection for certain records voluntarily shared with businesses, such as canceled checks sent to a bank or phone numbers dialed on a phone and transmitted over a phone company’s equipment. The government has extended that principle to cover various kinds of digital records, such as cell phone location data.

    “The court’s decision is a vindication of the arguments we have persistently made on behalf of Timothy Carpenter throughout this litigation — that the Constitution’s privacy protections fully apply to the digital location data created by using cell phones,” said attorney Harold Gurewitz, who represents Carpenter alongside the ACLU. “The ruling also affirms that prosecutors are required to get a search warrant in order to seize this kind of sensitive personal information.”

    The data acquired by police in the case provides a stark demonstration of how location data can reveal extraordinarily private details about people’s lives, from where they sleep to where they pray.

    For example, the location data showed that in the early afternoon on a number of Sundays, Carpenter made or received calls from the cell tower sectors nearest to his church. His cellphone records do not routinely show him in that area on other days of the week, implying that he was worshipping at those times. The data also shows which nights he slept at or near his home, and which nights he spent elsewhere.

    Carpenter is represented at the Supreme Court by the ACLU, the ACLU of Michigan, defense attorney Gurewitz of Gurewitz & Raben PLC, and Jeffrey Fisher, co-director of the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.

  • US Supreme Court considers privacy — or not — of your location data

    The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week on a case that could determine whether authorities can search cellphone location data without a warrant.

    In Carpenter v. U.S., the Court will eventually rule on whether the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, enacted in 1791 to safeguard citizens’ rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, extends to cover personal cellphone records tracking user location.

    The case began when police used records, obtained from a phone company and drawing on cell-tower location, to show that an individual’s cellphone was used in the vicinity of several armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio in 2010 and 2011.

    The appellants contend that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected their cellphone location records without a warrant. A federal appeals court ruled against the appeal, finding the Fourth Amendment doesn’t “yet” extend to cellphone location data.

    That court distinguished between the “content” of a communication and the “information necessary to send it.” The government can’t read letters or emails or listen to wiretapped conversation without a warrant, but it is entitled to the metadata used to send such content — in this case the phone company data showing in which tower’s cell area the phone was activated.

    “The business records here fall on the unprotected side of this line. Those records say nothing about the content of any calls,” the court ruled. “Instead the records include routing information, which the wireless providers gathered in the ordinary course of business.”

    The Supreme Court, in hearing the appeal on this decision, is expected to review — and possibly revise — its heretofore opinion that when users share information with a third party, such as a bank or telephone company, they lose the expectation that it will remain private. At question is whether cellphones have activated a new era of privacy expectations, in essence, whether legal doctrine needs to be subject to updates for the digital age.

    One tenet that no one questions is that cell phone users have no idea to what extent their phone companies know where they go and how long they stay there. Whether they care or not, or whether they are willing to sacrifice some amount of privacy for the convenience of cell phone access, remains to be seen. The limits for this have been explored but never completely settled, in controversies around Facebook’s (and others’) access to and use of customer data and profiles.

    Apple, Facebook, Google and Verizon have all filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief in Carpenter v. U.S. The tech gargantua seem to want, on the one hand, to discourage the possibility of government and law enforcement being able to access location data without a warrant, while also maintaining a clear and unencumbered route for themselves to use it. They argue that “Fourth Amendment doctrine must adapt to the changing realities of the digital era” and that “rigid analog-era rules should yield to consideration of reasonable expectations of privacy in the digital age.”

    After a related 2012 Supreme Court decision that attaching a GPS tracker to a car without a search warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the so-called third-party doctrine was “ill suited to the digital age” and that privacy case law should adapt to changes in society’s views that are occurring thanks to smartphones and other technology.

    For a summary of the arguments presented to the Court on November 29 in Carpenter v. U.S., see the SCOTUS blog here. Further developments in the case will appear on this page, and viewers may sign up for push updates as well.

    In 2008, GPS World published an editorial on this subject, in the guise of a parodized future film noir scenario, “The Call Tease Factor.” An expandable image appears at left. The essay opined that “Government agencies and police routinely tracked cell users’ location without a warrant or court oversight. . . . Challenges had faltered, and no one seemed to notice any more, or care much.”

    “Privacy, as least as far as location, no longer existed.”