Search of cell phone records by law enforcement agencies.

[wayneflorida 0]

Related article.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html

[AndyBoyd 0]

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Related article.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html

Yet another reason not to own a cell phone.

[quade 3]

I think warrants should be required for 99% of things, but the fact is we regularly screw ourselves a couple of ways; none of the least is we pay for the privilege of being GPS tracked. There's simply no way the government was going to let that go once GWB got that put in place for fighting the "war on terror." I'm actually OK with them going warrantless in the case of a hot pursuit, but it should require justification later.

The question is how long should that data be stored so it can be data mined without the warrants?

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[champu 1]

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a defendant in a drug trafficking case, Jose Navas, "did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the cell phone" location. That's because Navas only used the cell phone "on public thoroughfares en route from California to New York" and "if Navas intended to keep the cell phone's location private, he simply could have turned it off."

The reasonable expectation of privacy question is the core of this debate. Here are my thoughts...

If the law enforcement officers ware going around with their own radio receivers and homing in on the location of someone who has a cellphone on them that is transmitting, I would agree with the "no reasonable expectation of privacy" argument. The fact that cell phones emit radio signals can be considered common knowledge, and I'd liken the use of equipment to track these signals to holding your hand up to your ear, listening for a distinctive exhaust note of a suspect's vehicle, and concluding, "hey, I think he's over there!"

But communication between your cell phone and the phone companies' infrastructure, and derivatives of that communication (like phone location) are conducted for the purposes of providing you a service under a private contract with the phone company. Use of any information collected by the phone company for a purpose other than fulfilling your contract should be considered an infringement on your privacy and require a warrant.

Drawing the line of privacy between the location of your phone calls and the contents of them is asinine, and would be like saying you can pull all bank transactions a person has made without a warrant, so long as you don't get the dollar amounts.

[chutem 0]

The ability to turn on the microphone in a cell phone from a remote location, with a warrant of course, would be quite the crime fighting tool wouldn't it?

James

[Niki1 1]

By "phone records", do you mean the other phone numbers you called and called you or the content of those calls? I think content is already scanned, along with e-mail, by the NSA using key words. Or it might be just science fiction TV shit. On "Law and Order" they routinely obtain the "luds" (or lugs?) of a suspects phone, land line and wireless. Again, maybe TV shit. But I think the authorities are going to do what ever they think is right to catch whoever they think is the bad guy. Defining "the right thing" and "the bad guy", that's where the problems start.

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossilbe before they were done.
Louis D Brandeis

Where are we going and why are we in this basket?

[Lucky... 0]

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Quote

a defendant in a drug trafficking case, Jose Navas, "did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the cell phone" location. That's because Navas only used the cell phone "on public thoroughfares en route from California to New York" and "if Navas intended to keep the cell phone's location private, he simply could have turned it off."

The reasonable expectation of privacy question is the core of this debate. Here are my thoughts...

If the law enforcement officers ware going around with their own radio receivers and homing in on the location of someone who has a cellphone on them that is transmitting, I would agree with the "no reasonable expectation of privacy" argument. The fact that cell phones emit radio signals can be considered common knowledge, and I'd liken the use of equipment to track these signals to holding your hand up to your ear, listening for a distinctive exhaust note of a suspect's vehicle, and concluding, "hey, I think he's over there!"

But communication between your cell phone and the phone companies' infrastructure, and derivatives of that communication (like phone location) are conducted for the purposes of providing you a service under a private contract with the phone company. Use of any information collected by the phone company for a purpose other than fulfilling your contract should be considered an infringement on your privacy and require a warrant.

Drawing the line of privacy between the location of your phone calls and the contents of them is asinine, and would be like saying you can pull all bank transactions a person has made without a warrant, so long as you don't get the dollar amounts.

Katz v Ohio talks of people having privacy, not places. This was the 1960's and revolved around booky bets being placed at a payphone. The cops were ok to bug the phone booth, but then it wasn't ok as soon as a person was near. SO we could use the same reasoning of a case that is considered stare decisis and I guess it would then be ok for law to research phone records afterthe call is made. Again, the privacy falls subordinate once the person leaves and no conversation was recorded, just numbers dialed. If a conversation was recorded then I see this as intrusive as the evidence was memorialized, so privacy transfers. My personal take on this is taht it sucks, but I don't see it as intrusive as per SCOTUS that I know of. This is what happens when you have a fascist nation: the gov and corps jump in bed. We can see examples of this with the bank bailout from the gov to the corps, mandatory insurance with communication between ins corps and DMV agencies and many, many more examples.

[Lucky... 0]

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By "phone records", do you mean the other phone numbers you called and called you or the content of those calls? I think content is already scanned, along with e-mail, by the NSA using key words. Or it might be just science fiction TV shit. On "Law and Order" they routinely obtain the "luds" (or lugs?) of a suspects phone, land line and wireless. Again, maybe TV shit. But I think the authorities are going to do what ever they think is right to catch whoever they think is the bad guy. Defining "the right thing" and "the bad guy", that's where the problems start.

Phone records generally refers to number history as in a list of numbers dialed and recceived.

As for law, it all revolves around EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY and would a reasonable person feel they had that in a given situation.

[shropshire 0]

If you've done nowt wrong, you've got nowt t'worry about!

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Liemberg 0]

There is a rather famous case in Holland where somebody was convicted for a murder he never admitted and is still fighting in the high court (to get the conviction overthrown) in which the 'Cell phone localization' played a major role.

Not sure about the terminology, but they could prove that his cell phone was in contact with a certain node/ground station close to where the murder took place, during a conversation with the victim - while he maintained he was further away.

However, the so called 'timing advance' registration (that give a much better localization of your whereabouts than the registration with which node your cell phone effectively makes contact DURING a call) where not available during the court case and that still leaves some doubt about this conviction - where the accused (and convicted) maintains that this would corroborate HIS story about what he was doing / where he was that evening.
And yes, had they kept the 'timing advance' records longer than two months (or asked for them at the moment they asked for the actual phone records) it could have been proven once and for all if the guy was guilty or innocent or rather where he was in time and space at the night of the murder - where he said he was (and a victim of a phenomenon called 'Radio propagation' that can carry a cell phone signal further away, bypassing other nodes that may be busy during f.i. a traffic jam) or with much greater accuracy close to the scene of the crime.

So, like more things in life it is a two bladed sword or as our national philosopher (and famous soccer player) Johan Cruyff likes to put it; "Every advantage has its disadvantage"...

"Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory." - Leonardo da Vinci
A thousand words...