Supremes rule for protection of cellphone location data

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johndoe3
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Supremes rule for protection of cellphone location data

Post by johndoe3 »

https://www.cnet.com/news/supreme-court ... tion-data/
The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of digital privacy.

In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices decided that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for
trials. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Sixth Circuit court's decision.

Carpenter v. United States is the first case about phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov. 29.

The dispute dates back to a 2011 robbery in Detroit, after which police gathered months of phone location data from Timothy Carpenter's phone provider. They pulled together 12,898 different locations from Carpenter, over 127 days.

The legal and privacy concern was that police gathered the four months' worth of Carpenter's digital footprints without a warrant. A Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge ruled that cellphone location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure, and therefore didn't require a warrant.
Good decision for privacy rights of citizens under the 4th Amendment. For in the 5-4 decision: Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayer, Kagan, Ginsburg. What does that say about the statist votes by our favored Justices (Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito)?

If you want to read the written decision and dissent...
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/1 ... 2_h315.pdf
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...and those are pretty good odds.
Brett Maverick, gambler on TV (also used by Progressive leaders everywhere)
poikilotrm
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Re: Supremes rule for protection of cellphone location data

Post by poikilotrm »

So? The cops will still use Stingrays, they will still engage in parallel construction, and none of them will be prosecuted for it. The feds will still provide the devices to LEAs, and their agents will still teach classes on parallel construction.
The moments I was censored was the moment that I won. That's twice, now.Thanks jwbaker, et al, for my victories.
johndoe3
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Re: Supremes rule for protection of cellphone location data

Post by johndoe3 »

The SCOTUS decision mainly protected historical tracking data as Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

You're right, that law enforcement can use technical means in parallel to obtain current cellphone tracking data; but the decision does throw a roadblock into obtaining the complete historical tracking data, by requiring they obtain a warrant first.

Current locational data is akin to walking about in public where a person is easily seen, while historical tracking data is far more comprehensive since it makes bare a person's movements and locations over a long timeframe.

I'm happy with the decision for at least some privacy protections.
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...and those are pretty good odds.
Brett Maverick, gambler on TV (also used by Progressive leaders everywhere)
johndoe3
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Re: Supremes rule for protection of cellphone location data

Post by johndoe3 »

Even though Justice Gorsuch voted against Carpenter for the purposes of the case, he was for Carpenter and was for a more radical decision that would completely tear down the precedents in United States v Miller, and Smith v Maryland. Gorsuch wanted the court to decide based on an originalist/textualist basis for "property rights" under the 4th Amendment and not under "privacy rights" as the majority decided; and to completely throw out the third party precedents of the past. Gorsuch's written dissent was actually a concurrence for the decision.

http://reason.com/blog/2018/06/22/neil- ... ayor-in-qu
The Supreme Court developed the third-party doctrine in United States v. Miller, a 1976 case dealing with bank records, and Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 case involving "pen registers" that record the phone numbers called from a particular location. As the Court explained the principle in Miller, "the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed." Gorsuch recognizes the sweeping implications of that principle in an age when sensitive information is routinely stored on remote servers:

What's left of the Fourth Amendment? Today we use the Internet to do most everything. Smartphones make it easy to keep a calendar, correspond with friends, make calls, conduct banking, and even watch the game. Countless Internet companies maintain records about us and, increasingly, for us. Even our most private documents—those that, in other eras, we would have locked safely in a desk drawer or destroyed—now reside on third party servers. Smith and Miller teach that the police can review all of this material, on the theory that no one reasonably expects any of it will be kept private. But no one believes that, if they ever did....

Can the government demand a copy of all your e-mails from Google or Microsoft without implicating your Fourth Amendment rights? Can it secure your DNA from 23andMe without a warrant or probable cause? Smith and Miller say yes it can...But that result strikes most lawyers and judges today—me included—as pretty unlikely.


Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the majority opinion in Carpenter, expressed similar concerns in United States v. Jones, the 2012 decision that said monitoring a suspect's movements by attaching a GPS tracker to his car counts as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. In that case, Sotomayor observed that the third-party doctrine is "ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."

Gorsuch notes that "the Court has never offered a persuasive justification" for the third-party doctrine. A person's willingness to share information with someone else for a particular purpose does not imply that he is willing to share it with the world, and his awareness of the risk that it will nevertheless be divulged to others does not give those people permission to peruse it.
We can hope that SCOTUS moves towards Justice Gorsuch's viewpoint on property rights and the 4th Amendment.

Note: The others in the minority who voted against Carpenter (Alito, Thomas and Kennedy), also voted based on property rights of the historical cellphone location information. It's just that they decided that the information held by the cellphone companies was owned entirely by the companies--information accumulated by all the companies because of their 'terms of service' agreements. To me, the information is your historical location information and merely held by the company, so I disagree with Alito, Thomas and Kennedy on who owns my life information--I do.
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...and those are pretty good odds.
Brett Maverick, gambler on TV (also used by Progressive leaders everywhere)
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