Appeals court upholds Warrantless Cellphone tracking data.
As is my habit, first the snip.
In a significant victory for law enforcement, a federal appeals court on Tuesday said that government authorities could extract historical location data directly from telecommunications carriers without a search warrant.
The closely watched case, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is the first ruling that squarely addresses the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers. Ruling 2 to 1, the court said a warrantless search was “not per se unconstitutional” because location data was “clearly a business record” and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Then the link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/technology/warrantless-cellphone-tracking-is-upheld.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
So my position information, as is required that the business gather under Federal Law,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanced_911 is a business record and not protected by the 4th Amendment. I'm sorry, but if you require me to keep personal data on my customers, it isn't business data, it is by definition personal.
That's the thing here. All the cell phones with the GPS chip are required by Federal Law in case any of those phones ever call 911, which allows Emergency Services to see where the phone is located. IN CASE. But because it takes long minutes to get a GPS fix, and that would not provide the instantaneous location information that an emergency could require, the phones are constantly updating their location. That friends is the law, the law that Cell Phone Carriers must obey.
So the Federal Government passes a law that says that the business must have location data on your personal phone, and the Government then says that information is not personal information but business information and thus excluded from the 4th Amendment. Of course the Cops need this information. It makes it so much easier to track dozens of suspects on a computer than to put a tail on the guy who might be noticed, and worse, would probably be so incompetent as to lose the subject when he passed a donut shop.
