Fifth Circuit Cell Phone Tracking Case
EFF joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation and the ACLU Foundation of Texas in backing a judge who required a search warrant before approving the seizure of two months of cell phone location data by law enforcement. In this case, the government asked a magistrate judge to approve a request to two cell phone companies for 60 days of cell phone location records as part of a routine law enforcement investigation. The judge denied the request, saying it was necessary for the government to get a warrant based on probable cause before it could obtain the records. In an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, EFF argues that the judge was correct, as getting a warrant is essential to ensuring Fourth Amendment protections.
The case was argued to the Fifth Circuit in October 2, 2012 in New Orleans. In July 2013, the Fifth Circuit reversed the lower court in a 2-1 decision, ruling that law enforcement didn't need a search warrant to access historical cell site records.
Updates
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The Fourth Amendment protects us from “unreasonable” government searches of our persons, houses, papers and effects. How courts should determine what is and isn’t reasonable in our increasingly digital world is the subject of a new amicus brief we filed today in San Francisco federal court.
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1979 decision of Smith v. Maryland turned 35 years old last week. Since it was decided, Smith has stood for the idea that people have no expectation of privacy in information they expose to others. Labeled the third party “doctrine” (even by EFF ...
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When courts issue new decisions about how law enforcement can obtain records and data from companies, it's not just the police who have to follow the new rules. The companies that turn over the data have a big role to play in ensuring that the law is followed. A...
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Massachusetts police must now get a search warrant before they can track a person's past movements through their cell phone in an important new decision that has implications beyond just cell tracking in the Bay State.
In Commonwealth v. Augustine, state police relied on federal law to...
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An article yesterday in the Washington Post disclosed the NSA's massive cell phone location program. The program, codenamed CO-TRAVELER, is designed to track who meets with whom and covers everyone who carries a cell phone, all around the world.
With neither public debate nor court authorization, CO-TRAVELER collects...
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