Obama administration: cellphone location data is not ‘constitutionally protected’

Obama administration: cellphone location data is not ‘constitutionally protected’

Credit: Extremetech

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

In a federal court Tuesday, the Obama administration claimed that
Americans have absolutely no “reasonable expectation of privacy”
concerning cellphone location data, thus enabling law enforcement to
acquire detailed records of a user’s movements without even obtaining
probable cause warrant.

This is just one of the many cases of the Obama administration fighting to hold on to unconstitutional powers such as warrantless wiretapping, the power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial, and even their supposed right to refuse to explain why they believe they have the authority to assassinate Americans.

In court the administration cited a 1976 Supreme Court decision in the case United States v. Miller
which essentially stated that documents like banking records are
actually “third-party records,” thus removing any right to privacy.

The move was made in the course of the re-trial of an
alleged drug dealer whose conviction was overturned in January by the
Supreme Court. At the time, the Supreme Court ruled that the GPS tracking device employed by the government was, in fact, an illegal search.

The Supreme Court decision was relatively major seeing as it led the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to turn off a whopping 3,000 GPS-tracking devices in the field.





After the vehicle tracking data – spanning nearly a month of travel –
was thrown out, the government was forced to argue that they legally
obtained the cellphone location records of the defendant, Antoine Jones.
Unsurprisingly, they obtained the data without a warrant.

“A customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone
company reveals to the government its own records that were never in the
possession of the customer,” stated the Obama administration in a court filing dated September 4, 2012, provided by Wired’s Threat Level.

“When a cell phone user transmits a signal to a cell tower for his call
to be connected, he thereby assumes the risk that the cell phone
provider will create its own internal record of which of the company’s
towers handles the call,” the administration continued in the document.
“Thus, it makes no difference if some users have never thought about how
their cell phones work; a cell phone user can have no expectation of
privacy in cell-site information.”

Jones now has to fight the government’s claim that they do not have to
get a probable cause warrant for the location data from his cellphone
either, with his attorney Eduardo Balarezo writing to U.S. District
Judge Ellen Huvelle, “In this case, the government seeks to do with cell
site data what it cannot do with the suppressed GPS data.”

That seems like a quite accurate assessment from Balarezo, but obviously the government doesn’t share the sentiment.

“Defendant’s motion to suppress cell-site location records cannot
succeed under any theory. To begin with, no reasonable expectation of
privacy exists in the routine business records obtained from the
wireless carrier in this case, both because they are third-party records
and because in any event the cell-site location information obtained
here is too imprecise to place a wireless phone inside a
constitutionally protected space,” wrote the Obama administration in a
letter to the judge.

It will be quite interesting to see how this plays out because the lower
courts have been divided over the need for a probable cause warrant in
obtaining location tracking information, just as they were over the GPS
data.





The justification given in 2005 when the government first requested
Jones’ so-called “cell-site data” was essentially that they needed the
information in order to discover where Jones ran his drug operation
from.

However, if they had any legitimate evidence of Jones’ activities, one
would assume that they could just obtain a probable cause warrant before
requesting the data.

“Knowing the location of the trafficker when such telephone calls are
made will assist law enforcement in discovering the location of the
premises in which the trafficker maintains his supply narcotics,
paraphernalia used in narcotics trafficking such as cutting and
packaging materials, and other eviden[ce] of illegal narcotics
trafficking, including records and financial information,” wrote the
government in 2005.

With the GPS data being thrown out of court and thus along with it the
conviction of Jones and the life term he was to serve, the cellphone
location data is all the government has left in their quest to put Jones
behind bars and set a precedent which would allow them to regularly use
location data in court without obtaining a warrant.


Source:-
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/09/obama-administration-cellphone-location.html