A split federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that police do not need a search warrant before obtaining cell tower location data that can trace the long-term movements of a suspect’s mobile phone, while conceding that law had come “unmoored” from society’s notions of privacy.
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The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, voted 12-3 that the government can get the information under a decades-old legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company.
The ACLU was one of several organizations that filed friend-of-the court briefs in the case involving two men convicted of a series of armed robberies in the Baltimore area.
The court majority said the third-party doctrine applied to wireless carriers even though that user information is given to them “on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited objective and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed”.
And as the Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Jennifer Lynch noted in a blog post on Tuesday, “the Fourth Circuit took the third party doctrine further than any case we’ve seen so far”.
“A cell phone user voluntarily enters an arrangement with his service provider in which he knows that he must maintain proximity to the provider’s cell towers in order for his phone to function”, Judge Diana Motz wrote, Judge Diana Motz wrote for the majority.
The appellants were denied for both a rehearing in front of the original three-judge panel along with a rehearing in front of the entire Third Circuit, known as an en banc rehearing.
Whether or not they should have had access to the records was an issue that went before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. It is being closely watched nationwide as battles over the rights of transgender students head to court.
The NFL agreed to cover more than 20,000 retired players at a cost that could surpass $1 billion, a settlement reached after about 5,000 concussion-related lawsuits were filed against the league.
Nonetheless, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote a dissent, saying that he believes the case deserves to be reheard but declined to request a poll himself because he wants the case to move quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Joshua Block, the ACLU attorney representing Grimm, said he was pleased by the appeals court’s decision because it could mean a swifter resolution for the high school student, who was assigned female at birth but identifies as a boy.
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The case will be a bump in the road for privacy advocates, who have for the past few years tried to clarify the use of location-based data collected from cell phones and Global Positioning System devices. “The Fourth Circuit’s decision is not the last word on this issue”.
