« A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment is required for the police to obtain a suspect's cell-site data.
The decision by the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals gives the Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the issue, ammunition to resolve a modern-day privacy controversy affecting the tens of millions of American mobile phone users. Until Wednesday, all the federal appellate courts that have decided the issue have ruled for the government's proposition that cell-site records are not constitutionally protected.
But the Richmond, Virginia-based appeals court didn't buy the government's assertion that cell-site records are business records investigators may obtain from the telcos by asserting that there are reasonable grounds to believe the data is relevant to an investigation. The government's argument is known in legal jargon as the third-party doctrine.
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Wednesday's decision comes a week after the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Supreme Court to resolve the issue of whether warrants were required for the cell-site data. That case concerned a Florida man sentenced to life for a string of robberies in a case built with two months' worth of cell-site data. »
Thu Aug 6 11:28:54 2015 - permalink -
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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/warrant-required-for-mobile-phone-location-tracking-us-appeals-court-rules/