A federal appeals court has overturned a 2015 ruling prohibiting police from accessing citizens’ cell phone location data without a warrant, ruling that the Constitution allows the United States government to obtain such records without a judge’s permission.
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The panel of judges ruled 12-3 that police can get cell site location information (CSLI) through the legal understanding that the information is voluntarily provided to a third party, like an individual’s telephone company.
Writing for the majority, Judge Diana Motz said obtaining cell-site information did not violate the protection against unreasonable searches found in the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because cellphone users are generally aware that they are voluntarily sharing such data with their provider.
In 2015, law enforcement used CSLI to track two suspects in a series of robberies, Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan.
After two robbers were tracked down by police who used data obtained from their phone companies, the question arose of whether they can get that sort of information without a warrant.
“The Supreme Court may in the future limit, or even eliminate, the third-party doctrine”.
The ruling is a victory for the USA government and makes it less likely the Supreme Court will take up the case.
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. However, the court voted to rehear the case with all 15 judges participating.
Appeals court Judge James A. Wynn wrote that the so-called “third-party doctrine” exempts from Fourth Amendment protection information that is voluntarily conveyed by its owner.
Several civil liberties groups and privacy advocates joined the lawsuit, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys.
They cited a number of recent cases by the Supreme Court, including a 2012 decision in which the high court ruled that when law enforcement installed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle, that constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment that required a warrant.
“As the dissenting judges explain, because months’ worth of cell phone location data can reveal extraordinarily private details of a person’s life, the right way to protect people’s privacy interest in that information is to require a warrant”, the ACLU’s Nathan Freed Wessler said.
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The ruling allows police to obtain location data from cellular carriers with a court order, with a lower standard than a warrant.
