Deeplinks Blog posts about Cell Tracking
Illinois has joined the growing ranks of states limiting how police may use cell-site simulators, invasive technology devices that masquerade as cell phone towers and turn our mobile phones into surveillance devices. By adopting the Citizen Privacy Protection Act, Illinois last month joined half a dozen other states—as well as the Justice Department and one federal judge—that have reiterated the constitutional requirement for police to obtain a judicial warrant before collecting people's location and other personal information using cell-site simulators.
Last week, Santa Clara County—which encompasses much of Silicon Valley—set a new standard in local surveillance transparency after months of activism by residents and allies from across the Bay Area. Their efforts, and the policy it enabled, suggest an overlooked strategy in the national battle to curtail unaccountable secret mass surveillance.
Thanks to EFF and the ACLU, the government has finally admitted it secretly used a Stingray to locate a defendant in a Wisconsin criminal case, United States v. Damian Patrick. Amazingly, the government didn’t disclose this fact to the defendant—or the court—until we raised it in an amicus brief we filed in the case. In the government’s brief, filed late last week, it not only fails to acknowledge the impact of hiding this fact from the defendant but also claims its warrantless real-time location tracking didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment.
This week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held, in United States v. Carpenter, that we lack any privacy interest in the location information generated by our cell phones. The opinion shows a complete disregard for the sensitive and revealing nature of cell site location information (CSLI) and a misguided response to the differences between the analog technologies addressed in old cases and the data-rich technologies of today.
On Wednesday, September 16, nine months into the 114th Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the federal law that regulates government access to private communications records stored by third parties.
Right now, the statute allows the government to obtain private messages that are older than 180 days—including web-based emails, social media messages, text messages, and voicemails—as well as private documents stored by “cloud” service providers like Dropbox, with an administrative subpoena. ECPA was first passed in 1986 before Congress could imagine the wealth of personal information that would be stored on third-party servers rather than private hard drives.
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