Today, the ACLU of Massachusetts, along with 33 other state-based ACLU affiliates, filed a public records act request to uncover information about warrantless cell phone tracking.
As of December 2010, over 96 percent of the overall population of the United States carried a cell phone—an estimated 302.9 million people. But while Americans have quickly embraced cell phones and the convenience they offer, the widespread use of cell phones has given the government the unprecedented ability to track people’s movements by tracking the geographical location of their cell phones.
What’s revealed by location tracking can be intensely personal. For example, as one court recently wrote, knowing someone’s location can reveal whether a person “is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
Location information is so sensitive that the authorities should only be able to get it by demonstrating probable cause to a judge and getting a warrant – just as they must do to intrude on your privacy in other ways. The Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and there is nothing reasonable about tracking our movements without the approval of a judge.
Unfortunately, not all police departments agree that probable cause and a warrant are necessary.
That is why the ACLU filed public records act requests to uncover information about warrantless cell phone tracking. We have a right to know about how the police are using cell phones to track people. We want to know:
• Do the police show probable cause and get a warrant to track cell phones?
• How often do the police obtain cell phone location information?
• Once the police get cell phone location information from a cell phone company, do they keep it forever or do they get rid of it after a limited time?
• How much money are the police spending to get cell phone location information?
We’ll keep you posted on what we learn. In the meantime, the ACLU will be continuing to work in the courts, in Congress, in state legislatures across the country, and with companies to better safeguard sensitive location information. We hope you will join us and contact your member of Congress to urge them to support new location privacy bills introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This public records request and our efforts in Congress are part of our broader Demand your dotRights Campaign to make sure that as technology advances, our privacy rights are not left behind.
I’m curious why 16 state affiliates of the ACLU didn’t join the suit.
who sponsored the way crazy “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill that the House passed last month as part of the debt ceiling fight?
Wow – way to turn swords into plowshares, I hope.
If I’m anyplace other than my own residence I don’t feel as though I have much reasonable expectation of privacy. Anyone could have seen me walk into a church, a bar, or a gym, which are also places likely to have “regulars” who can be asked by cops if they’ve seen me.
I think a reasonable interpretation of the Second Amendment in the 21st century standard is that technology available to the government should also be available to individuals. Yes, of course, it can and should be regulated (like our First Amendment rights), but individual access to technology is a basic human right in a technological world.
In this case, just as in video surveillance, the cat is already out of the bag. After all, cell-phone tracking is just one more arrow in the quiver. There is browser tracking, face-recognition software, RFID tracking — a long and growing list of ways for the government (or any other sufficiently funded organization) to track individuals.
Rather than ban it, I think a better approach is to make whatever information is available to government also available to individuals. I have a much easier time knowing that Detective Baker can track my whereabouts if I have the same ability to track Detective Baker.
In my view, it is a disparity between governmental and individual power that is problematic, more than any specific technological capability. I find this particularly true at the local level.