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JUDGES WEIGH GPS PHONE TRACKING...?
State and federal authorities follow the movements of
thousands of
Americans each year by secretly monitoring the location of their
cellphones,
often with little judicial oversight, in a practice facing legal
challenges.
Return
Back To OnlinePot's Maximum Security Section Main Start Page
And Check Out The Rest Of Our Security Data "To Keep You Safe!"
Police Use GPS To Track Suspects Despite Murky Law
Secret
FBI GPS tracking ignites legal firestorm The FBI got caught! But you can
pretty well
bet every other Law Enforcement Unit & LEO Alphabet Groups are doing the
same thing
in any state or country. EVERY DAY!
Electronic tracking, used by police to investigate such crimes as drug dealing
and murder, has become as routine as "looking for fingerprint evidence or
DNA evidence," said Gregg Rossman, a prosecutor in Broward County, Fla.
The use of cellphone tracking by authorities is among the most common types of
electronic surveillance, exceeding wiretaps and the use of GPS tracking,
according to a survey of local, state and federal authorities by The Wall Street
Journal.
The widening practice also presents one of the biggest privacy questions in a
generation: Do police need a search warrant to follow a person's
minute-by-minute movements using satellite or cellphone technology?
The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in the case of Antoine Jones, whose
movements were electronically tracked for a month after police attached a global
positioning satellite, or GPS, device to his wife's Jeep Grand Cherokee. A drug
conviction against the Washington, D.C., nightclub owner was overturned on
appeal because such intrusive monitoring should require a search warrant, the
appeals court said.
The U.S. government argued Tuesday that its use of GPS beepers such as the type
in the Jones case was in the "low thousands" each year.
But other lawyers say the court's decision will likely affect the far more
common police practice of tracking users of the nation's 327 million cellphones.
Al Gidari, a partner at law firm Perkins Coie whose clients include mobile
carriers, told Congress last year that wireless service providers receive an
"astronomical" number of requests for user records--including
location. "It is not uncommon for law enforcement to ask for a phone to
be" tracked every 15 minutes, he said.
Little is known about the practice because tracking requests are typically
sealed from public view. While search warrants are generally delivered to people
whose property is being searched, most people whose phones are targeted never
learn about it. They typically find out only if they are charged with a crime
and their tracking data are used as evidence against them.
The Journal identified more than 1,000 instances of cellphone tracking in
several large U.S. cities last year through open-records requests and court
documents. The data showed that the practice is a widely and increasingly used
police tool.
The Los Angeles Police Department last year, for example, tracked 295 phones, up
35% from a year earlier, according to department records. Miami-Dade police said
it tracked locations of 130 phones in 2010, up from 102 in 2009. Federal
prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida, meanwhile, sought cellphone
location data 189 times last year, up 8% from 2009, according to court records.
Magistrate Stephen Smith of Houston, Texas, who approves such surveillance
orders, has been studying the available data and estimates that federal courts
alone issue 20,000 to 30,000 cellphone tracking orders annually. By comparison,
federal and state courts approved 3,194 wiretaps in 2010, according to federal
records.
At issue is whether electronic tracking is comparable to such routine
surveillance as following a suspect in an unmarked police car on city streets,
as the federal government argues.
For years, courts have wrestled with how electronic tracking fits with the
Constitution's prohibition against searching a home, for instance, unless police
can persuade a judge to sign a search warrant.
The federal government says authorities can use electronic surveillance to track
vehicles on public roads without a warrant, citing a 1983 Supreme Court ruling
that declared there is no reasonable expectation of privacy there.
The government also contends that most cellphone tracking conforms to a lower
legal standard than a search warrant, which requires authorities show probable
cause to suspect connection to a crime. Instead, the government says cellphone
tracking is governed by a 1986 law that requires only that police provide a
judge with facts "showing that there are reasonable grounds to
believe" the material sought is relevant to a criminal investigation.
But federal courts have been increasingly questioning whether these lower
standards should apply to information as sensitive as a person's location.
State laws and legal precedents also vary. New York and California courts
generally require search warrants to track a phone's location, but not courts in
Florida.
To identify a bank robber, prosecutors in Connecticut obtained records for 169
phones in 2009 without a search warrant. Prosecutors later used phone records to
show the location of suspects around the time of the robberies.
Ben Dawes of Hartford, whose phone number was among those listed in court
papers, didn't know he had been tracked until told by a Journal reporter.
"It's not something I'm happy about," he said. Mr. Dawes, who has no
other known connection to the case, said he understood the need to examine phone
records, but wished he had been told. Tom Carson, a spokesman for the U.S.
Attorney's office in Hartford, declined to comment.
Police can track phones by analyzing signals from towers that connect cellphone
calls or, in some cases, through GPS satellites. The precision varies. Data from
a single tower in a rural area may only locate a phone within 10 miles. But
combining signals from multiple towers in an urban area can locate a phone
within 50 yards.
Tracking is becoming more precise as wireless companies install more towers.
CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group, said there were 256,920 cellphone
sites in the U.S. in June, up from 178,000 in 2005. GPS is more precise, but the
signal doesn't work indoors and not all phones use GPS.
As the frequency of tracking has increased, more judges have raised the need for
search warrants. More than a dozen magistrates have written opinions denying
applications for court orders to track cellphones. The nation's roughly 500
magistrates act as assistant judges in U.S. District Courts, handling requests
for search warrants and other types of surveillance.
The so-called magistrates' revolt traces its history to a 2005 opinion written
by Magistrate Smith in Texas.
Magistrate Smith said he was puzzled by cellphone-tracking requests when he was
new to the bench: he couldn't find a provision in the law allowing police to
track a phone for as long as 60 days without a search warrant. To learn more, he
visited the U.S. Marshals surveillance operation and quizzed lawyers at
cellphone companies about government requests.
Prosecutors told him they had authority to track phones with a court order by
combining two portions of the 1986 law: one allows collection of historical
location data; the other allows the real-time collection of cellphone calling
data but not location. Taken together, the government argued that it could track
a cellphone's location without having to show probable cause.
On Oct. 14, 2005, Magistrate Smith denied a government request in an opinion
that called the government's legal theory "undeniably creative." But
"mixing and matching of statutory provisions," he said, would create a
"new form of electronic surveillance" not envisioned by the law.
Within six months, nine other magistrates also denied tracking requests, relying
in part on Magistrate Smith's reasoning. Other magistrates sided with the
government, agreeing that cellphone locators weren't precise enough to require a
search warrant.
The magistrate rebellion prompted changes in some jurisdictions. U.S. Attorneys
in Los Angeles, for example, agreed to obtain search warrants for cellphone
location information in federal cases.
The Justice Department recommended that prosecutors obtain search warrants when
tracking phones using such "precise" technology as GPS or multiple
cellphone towers, according to documents dated in 2007 obtained by the American
Civil Liberties Union in a freedom-of-information request. The department
continued to argue that less precise tracking of phones didn't require a
warrant.
A year later, the legal battle moved from cellphone tracking to records of
cellphone locations. A group of magistrates in Pennsylvania, led by Magistrate
Lisa Lenihan, wrote an unusual joint decision in 2008 that denied a government
application for historical records of cellphone locations, saying that
cellphones were being used by authorities as personal tracking devices.
"Americans do not generally know that a record of their whereabouts is
being created whenever they travel about with their cellphones," Magistrate
Lenihan wrote. "Most Americans would be appalled by the notion that the
government could obtain such a record without at least a neutral, judicial
determination of probable cause."
Most cellphone companies keep historical records of location data for a year or
more, according to a Justice Department document obtained by the ACLU through
the Freedom of Information Act.
The government appealed the magistrates' ruling. Lawyers argued that cellphones
were not tracking devices because the location information was only accurate
within several hundred feet. The appeals court didn't fully resolve the issue
and the government didn't get the cellphone records it sought.
The Jones case gave new fuel to the debate. In October, 2010, Magistrate Smith
cited the case in denying a federal government request for 60 days of historical
cellphone location records. "Two months' worth of hourly tracking data will
inevitably reveal a rich slice of the user's life, activities and
associations," he wrote. The government has appealed.
Pubdate: Wed, 09 Nov 2011
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Author: Julia Angwin and Scott Thurm. Justin Scheck contributed to this article.
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