In this case, police obtained the location data from Timothy Carpenter's cell phone service provider without a warrant, and that data was used to help convict him of a string of robberies by placing him near the scene of each crime.
Carpenter and the ACLU say that because police failed to obtain a warrant related to that location data, it violates his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. The government says it needs only to demonstrate reasonable grounds, not probable cause, to access the data.
The larger question, though, is not whether police should be required to obtain a warrant to access location data from cell phone service providers, but whether cell phone service providers should be providing this information to police without a warrant.
In other words, if cell phone service providers were taking their customers' privacy (and constitutional rights) seriously, then this Supreme Court case should actually be the government suing a cell phone service provider for not turning over customer data in a case where a warrant has not been issued.
One other thing that should be scrutinized in general: correlating cell phone location with actual person location is used as concrete admissible evidence.
Another consideration: how can one challenge this evidence on-par with an hope of success? I imagine personal records showing discrepancies or outright fabrication on the carrier's part would not easily be accepted.
Finally, the carrier was provided, but the phone itself wasn't identified. Was this a dumb phone, Android or iOS device? Does it matter?
>Finally, the carrier was provided, but the phone itself wasn't identified. Was this a dumb phone, Android or iOS device? Does it matter?
It does not matter. Every carrier maintains a list of connected to towers for a month or more. This is the data those companies would be providing to LEO.
Another consideration: How easy is it to spoof a sim card? Someone might be trying to implicate the accused by duplicating their sim card and taking a phone with the duplicated sim card to every robbery they commit.
> Another consideration: How easy is it to spoof a sim card?
Spoof? No. You can clone a card if you get physical access to it and it uses the older COMP128v1 encryption as the key is just 56-bit to bruteforce. This allows you to use their IMSI.
You'd also need to spoof the IMEI of the target device, which can only be done easily on older phones (original iPhone with early baseband is one) or with custom built solutions (think SDR, hackrf stuff)
I am fairly certain most major US carriers are not using the old-style SIM card anymore for this very reason. To support 3G and later on LTE, the cards would have to be upgraded.
Although the point I think you're making is pretty much true for all circumstantial evidence. Sure maybe someone who looks like you took your car for a drive in the middle of the night while you were sleeping, but absent a plausible alternative theory, a jury is going to be skeptical. There often aren't smoking guns.
this will fly likely under the same rules as red light cameras which send a ticket to the owner regardless of who is driving. you "car/phone/spirit/thoughts" were there so you are considered there.
going to be interesting if the government loses the case if rules and regulation are pushed through Congress mandating availability. they could try to declare it public property since it does pass through public airspace/radio space. all sorts of angles they can push. (its coming, just when and with what protections for our privacy will be most important)
> this will fly likely under the same rules as red light cameras which send a ticket to the owner regardless of who is driving. you "car/phone/spirit/thoughts" were there so you are considered there
In most states, the red light ordinance makes the driver liable, not the owner. There is no "you were there in proxy" rule of the sort you suggest. The law merely creates a rebuttable presumption that the owner was driving. Also, Courts have upheld the presumption because red light tickets are civil infractions, not criminal penalties. The due process clause recognizes that the amount of process "due" (i.e. warranted, or appropriate in a given context) depends on the magnitude of the deprivation of property rights at issue. Civil infractions thus create lower due process concerns than criminal cases.
In this case, there was no similar presumption along the lines of: "your phone was here, therefore you were here." It was simply circumstantial evidence of the sort regularly used in criminal prosecutions (e.g. your business card was found at the murder scene).
The real concern here is an evidentiary issue. Cell tower tracking isn't very precise. Courts need to make sure that the jury appropriately understands the lack of precision in the data. Courts are often very bad at this. E.g. courts often don't permit defendants to argue to the jury that, even though the probability of a false random match in DNA testing is remote in theory, in practice the odds of wrong results due to lab error are astronomically higher (almost 1 in 100).
The Stingray is legally grayer. Carrier data is squarely within the third party doctrine.[1] The fourth amendment protects individuals' rights in "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." A carrier's billing records are not your papers and effects; they're the carrier's property, generated by the carrier for the carrier's own internal purposes.[1]
The Stingray, however, interacts directly with the suspect's cell phone. Third party doctrine becomes irrelevant at that point, and the government has to fall back to arguing that whatever a Stingray does is not a "search" or a "seizure."
[1] Doesn't mean the Supreme Court won't limit third party doctrine in this case.
[2] Say some nosy neighbor keeps a list every person that enters or leaves a house in a neighborhood. The resident of the house is murdered. The nosy neighbor's list shows that you entered the house the day of the murder. You can't assert a 4th amendment right as to the nosy neighbor's list. It's a paper that's about you, but it's not your paper.
The providers are responsible for their customer's privacy, to whatever extent is laid out in the contract, so I could see a grounds for some sort of liability there. But I don't see how the company is responsible for their customer's constitutional rights. I would think that that question should be more about whether the government actors can ask for and use that data.
It's worse than you may think. They generally will not have standing to sue the government for violating their customers rights. Only the customers would have standing to sue
"In other words, if cell phone service providers were taking their customers' privacy (and constitutional rights) seriously, then this Supreme Court case should actually be the government suing a cell phone service provider for not turning over customer data in a case where a warrant has not been issued.
"
As much as i hate the cell phone providers, they are fairly screwed here.
>The larger question, though, is not whether police should be required to obtain a warrant to access location data from cell phone service providers, but whether cell phone service providers should be providing this information to police without a warrant.
It's not really about whether they can provide this information to the police without a warrant. They can. The 4th Amendment doesn't protect against someone sharing your secrets voluntarily.
But this wasn't a voluntary sharing of information. It's done by a government order under the Shared Communications Act. Under current Court precedence this law is constitutional, but there are decent arguments was wrong when it decided that.
Assuming there's a valid justification, I'd love for the SCOTUS to conclude that any service provided by a government-sanctioned monopoly (cell providers, cable providers, etc.) is required to provide strong protections to customers' data.
I think there is a pretty good justification for state enforced monopolies to be treated as an arm of the state. However, cell providers certainly don't qualify. They aren't a monopoly--there are at least four of them--and they aren't really government sanctioned.
The FCC auctions exclusive-use spectrum. That doesn't make them a government monopoly any more than an exclusive-use lease on a piece of land from the Department of the Interior.
All property rights are a narrow monopoly. The local grocery store has a monopoly over their parcel of land, but that doesn't create a monopoly over the whole market.
Is it really accurate to use "monopoly" for cell providers? AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon all have most of the US population covered, giving most in the US a choice of at least 3 if not 4 providers.
And we just elected the most anti-civil-right president in history, who is backed by the anti-civil-rights party controlling all three houses of government. We really fell over hard last November.
This kind of "sky is falling" post just seems histrionic and ill informed.
Do you know which president was the first to be pro-gay marriage at the time of his election? Have you ever heard of President Wilson? Are you aware of the recently unearthed record of the NSA's violations of the protections put in place to preserve Americans privacy? Do you know which president prosecuted more leakers than all others combined?
I do not share your view at all.
Perhaps having a diverse point from yours, will be labeled a 'hate speech' or some other form of left-propaganda-consistent labeling. I hope not, however.
US citizens just elected the best choice of the leader, that will stop blatant misuse of US's foreign intelligence services.
That will stop one-sided indoctrination of the kids in public schools.
The president, that will protect American IT workers from unfair global competition in their own local market space.
And a president, that will finally do what he was promising to do.. I bet it is refreshing for folks that voted for him.
I also hope, but this is far fetched, that he will get USA out of supporting UN [0].
While I am very much for a number of goals that UN is meant to achieve, the current organization is a disgrace.
So if you think that being monitored and unmasked without reason by CIA or FBI -- is your civil right, then, yes, you are out of luck with Trump.
Back to the original topic, I would stand with the defendant in this case. Any data initially collected by a centralized service provider, (when the person of interest was not, yet a suspect), for technical purposes of running a service, cannot be used for marketing, criminal investigation or anything else.
Donald Trump has been a notorious peddler of BS for over _40 years_... why anyone would believe _anything_ that comes out of his mouth about anything is beyond me; he obviously doesn't believe anything he says, why would you?
Do you actually have any evidence that he is doing any of this, or are we still at the wishful thinking stage?
And we just elected the most anti-civil-right president in history, who is backed by the anti-civil-rights party controlling all three houses of government.
As opposed to the other anti-civil-rights party? Or was there a bunch of civil rights progress during the 111th congress when they controlled the legislature and executive, that nobody ever noticed?
I don't seem to remember hearing landmark civil rights legislation coming from that congress. Or -- relevent to this surveillance thread -- seeing the PATRIOT Act repealed. Not only did they just not do anything, they reauthorized section 215.
Remember that section? One of the powers Snowden revealed to be abused by the security state? And downplayed by Obama as needing reform?
But yeah, complain about Trump/Republicans in a thread about surveillance. That's productive.
> Cell phone location by cell phone radio towers (not GPS or wifi) is terribly inaccurate.
Do you speak about this from hearsay or based in some actual involvement in the mobile telephony industry? I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say if it's the latter.
normally a mobile operator would not know the 'GPS' location of a person. Just the tower IDs they were connected to. And that connection could be several kilometers away from the person.
Operator knows probably the strength of signal and may be other characteristics of the devices, that would help to reduce the possible radius. But I doubt it is anywhere near as precise as GPS.
GPS location, of course is much more precise, and is likely collected by say google maps or other installed apps, if maps is turned on.
>As I made my own way to the tram, I wrote in my Apple Notes app, "Helicopter hovering overhead," which to me signified that the fans were being watched over. Then two policemen stopped me and asked me who I was with and whether I'd written anything about a helicopter into my phone, without explaining the technology of how they'd read my Notes app. After a friendly back-and-forth, they looked through my bag, checked my ID and business card and determined I wasn't a threat. "You have to understand, tensions are running high," one of the men said with a smile and a handshake, allowing me through the gate. Manchester was secure tonight.
45 comments
[ 10.6 ms ] story [ 1009 ms ] threadCarpenter and the ACLU say that because police failed to obtain a warrant related to that location data, it violates his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. The government says it needs only to demonstrate reasonable grounds, not probable cause, to access the data.
The larger question, though, is not whether police should be required to obtain a warrant to access location data from cell phone service providers, but whether cell phone service providers should be providing this information to police without a warrant.
In other words, if cell phone service providers were taking their customers' privacy (and constitutional rights) seriously, then this Supreme Court case should actually be the government suing a cell phone service provider for not turning over customer data in a case where a warrant has not been issued.
One other thing that should be scrutinized in general: correlating cell phone location with actual person location is used as concrete admissible evidence.
Finally, the carrier was provided, but the phone itself wasn't identified. Was this a dumb phone, Android or iOS device? Does it matter?
It does not matter. Every carrier maintains a list of connected to towers for a month or more. This is the data those companies would be providing to LEO.
Spoof? No. You can clone a card if you get physical access to it and it uses the older COMP128v1 encryption as the key is just 56-bit to bruteforce. This allows you to use their IMSI.
You'd also need to spoof the IMEI of the target device, which can only be done easily on older phones (original iPhone with early baseband is one) or with custom built solutions (think SDR, hackrf stuff)
I am fairly certain most major US carriers are not using the old-style SIM card anymore for this very reason. To support 3G and later on LTE, the cards would have to be upgraded.
going to be interesting if the government loses the case if rules and regulation are pushed through Congress mandating availability. they could try to declare it public property since it does pass through public airspace/radio space. all sorts of angles they can push. (its coming, just when and with what protections for our privacy will be most important)
In most states, the red light ordinance makes the driver liable, not the owner. There is no "you were there in proxy" rule of the sort you suggest. The law merely creates a rebuttable presumption that the owner was driving. Also, Courts have upheld the presumption because red light tickets are civil infractions, not criminal penalties. The due process clause recognizes that the amount of process "due" (i.e. warranted, or appropriate in a given context) depends on the magnitude of the deprivation of property rights at issue. Civil infractions thus create lower due process concerns than criminal cases.
In this case, there was no similar presumption along the lines of: "your phone was here, therefore you were here." It was simply circumstantial evidence of the sort regularly used in criminal prosecutions (e.g. your business card was found at the murder scene).
The real concern here is an evidentiary issue. Cell tower tracking isn't very precise. Courts need to make sure that the jury appropriately understands the lack of precision in the data. Courts are often very bad at this. E.g. courts often don't permit defendants to argue to the jury that, even though the probability of a false random match in DNA testing is remote in theory, in practice the odds of wrong results due to lab error are astronomically higher (almost 1 in 100).
The Stingray, however, interacts directly with the suspect's cell phone. Third party doctrine becomes irrelevant at that point, and the government has to fall back to arguing that whatever a Stingray does is not a "search" or a "seizure."
[1] Doesn't mean the Supreme Court won't limit third party doctrine in this case.
[2] Say some nosy neighbor keeps a list every person that enters or leaves a house in a neighborhood. The resident of the house is murdered. The nosy neighbor's list shows that you entered the house the day of the murder. You can't assert a 4th amendment right as to the nosy neighbor's list. It's a paper that's about you, but it's not your paper.
As much as i hate the cell phone providers, they are fairly screwed here.
See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act
and friends.
It's not really about whether they can provide this information to the police without a warrant. They can. The 4th Amendment doesn't protect against someone sharing your secrets voluntarily.
But this wasn't a voluntary sharing of information. It's done by a government order under the Shared Communications Act. Under current Court precedence this law is constitutional, but there are decent arguments was wrong when it decided that.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/supreme-court-to-hear-case-on-trac...
and case page http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/carpenter-v-unite...
(Yes, I realize this is pure fantasy on my part.)
Do you know which president was the first to be pro-gay marriage at the time of his election? Have you ever heard of President Wilson? Are you aware of the recently unearthed record of the NSA's violations of the protections put in place to preserve Americans privacy? Do you know which president prosecuted more leakers than all others combined?
US citizens just elected the best choice of the leader, that will stop blatant misuse of US's foreign intelligence services.
That will stop one-sided indoctrination of the kids in public schools.
The president, that will protect American IT workers from unfair global competition in their own local market space.
And a president, that will finally do what he was promising to do.. I bet it is refreshing for folks that voted for him.
I also hope, but this is far fetched, that he will get USA out of supporting UN [0]. While I am very much for a number of goals that UN is meant to achieve, the current organization is a disgrace.
So if you think that being monitored and unmasked without reason by CIA or FBI -- is your civil right, then, yes, you are out of luck with Trump.
Back to the original topic, I would stand with the defendant in this case. Any data initially collected by a centralized service provider, (when the person of interest was not, yet a suspect), for technical purposes of running a service, cannot be used for marketing, criminal investigation or anything else.
[0] https://www.sott.net/article/314600-Operating-like-thugs-Ind...
Do you actually have any evidence that he is doing any of this, or are we still at the wishful thinking stage?
As opposed to the other anti-civil-rights party? Or was there a bunch of civil rights progress during the 111th congress when they controlled the legislature and executive, that nobody ever noticed?
I don't seem to remember hearing landmark civil rights legislation coming from that congress. Or -- relevent to this surveillance thread -- seeing the PATRIOT Act repealed. Not only did they just not do anything, they reauthorized section 215.
Remember that section? One of the powers Snowden revealed to be abused by the security state? And downplayed by Obama as needing reform?
But yeah, complain about Trump/Republicans in a thread about surveillance. That's productive.
That works (for now)
Cell phone location by cell phone radio towers (not GPS or wifi) is terribly inaccurate.
It's not credible that the guy would go to jail because he was in a half mile area around a few robberies. There has to be more evidence than that.
Do you speak about this from hearsay or based in some actual involvement in the mobile telephony industry? I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say if it's the latter.
GPS location, of course is much more precise, and is likely collected by say google maps or other installed apps, if maps is turned on.
It's not. It can be off by several kilometers. Wifi is more precise due to many wifi APs and lower access radius.
That's too long to explain in a message but that looks like a nice subject to cover in a future blog post.
>As I made my own way to the tram, I wrote in my Apple Notes app, "Helicopter hovering overhead," which to me signified that the fans were being watched over. Then two policemen stopped me and asked me who I was with and whether I'd written anything about a helicopter into my phone, without explaining the technology of how they'd read my Notes app. After a friendly back-and-forth, they looked through my bag, checked my ID and business card and determined I wasn't a threat. "You have to understand, tensions are running high," one of the men said with a smile and a handshake, allowing me through the gate. Manchester was secure tonight.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/live-reviews/ariana-grande...