Mediaboss Marketing

Location data from your phone may fall under the protection of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and advocates from various circles, including the tech world, are making the argument that this should be the case. The conversation was started by a court case known as Carter v. the United States, wherein the court is seeking the right to obtain rough location data to track the defendant over the course of 127 days. Carter is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. The movement includes representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Verizon, and a panel of experts from around the tech sphere. The base argument is that obtaining data constitutes seizure, while interpreting the data constitutes search, two activities that are restricted by the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment protects from unreasonable examples of those activities, and establishes the requirement for law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before performing most types of search and seizure procedures.

The type of location data thats presently at the center of the conversation is the somewhat less precise location data that can be gleaned from any device connected to a cellular network, with or without the involvement of GPS. This data includes a triangulation of your current location from nearby cell towers, as well as the locations of nearby Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi networks, if available. This data tends to be less precise than GPS data, with an average accuracy of a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters, depending on network conditions. Thanks to the deployment of a larger amount of towers and small cells and more sophisticated network equipment, as well as a larger amount of mobile, IoT, and other electronic devices around at any given time, this location data has been less prone to gross inaccuracy in recent years.

The location data in question has, in the past, been considered imprecise enough to not warrant it being categorized as personal or private data. Police have used such data on a fairly routine basis for more rough usages, such as obtaining evidence of an alibi or a lack of one, putting multiple defendants near the scene of a crime at the same time, and doing other investigative tasks. Having such data require a warrant going forward could make investigations costlier and slower, which in turn means that the privacy and security advocates trying to push for this change will have an uphill battle ahead of them.

See the rest here:
4th Amendment Protections Sought For Cell Site Location Data - Android Headlines

Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images

Fourteen of the biggest US tech companies filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Monday supporting more rigorous warrant requirements for law enforcement seeking certain cell phone data, such as location information. In the statement, the signatoriesGoogle, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft among themargue that the government leans on outdated laws from the 1970s to justify Fourth Amendment overreach. One perhaps surprising voice in the chorus of protesters? Verizon.

Verizon's support means that the largest wireless service provider in the US, and a powerful force in Silicon Valley, has bucked a longtime trend of telecom acquiescence. While carriers have generally been willing to comply with a broad range of government requestseven building out extensive infrastructure to aid surveillanceVerizon has this time joined with academics, analysts, and the companys more privacy-focused corporate peers.

Carpenter v. United States is one of the most important Fourth Amendment cases in recent memory, Craig Silliman, Verizons executive vice president for public policy and general counsel, wrote on Monday. Although the specific issue presented to the Court is about location information, the case presents a broader issue about a customers reasonable expectation of privacy for other types of sensitive data she shares with any third party. Our hope is that when it decides this case, the Court will help us better apply old Fourth Amendment doctrines to an evolving digital era.

From the early days of landlines, telecoms have complied with law enforcement requests for customer data such as call length, location, and who has called whom. As the variety of data customers generate has exponentially expanded and evolved, so has this information gathering by government officials, often under a general mandate and without a case-specific warrant. For its part, Verizon cooperated with the National Security Agency as part of broad bulk surveillance programs for years. Details of this coordination was revealed in NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, but some aspects of it had been publicly debated for years prior.

Carpenter v. United States, which the Supreme Court will hear this fall, relates to the acquisition, without a warrant, of months of individuals location records by law enforcement officials in 2011. Officials looked back on 12,898 location records, spanning a four-month period, of one of these individuals, Timothy Carpenter, to build their case; Carpenter was eventually convicted. His appeal argues that location-data collection by law enforcement without a warrant violates his Fourth Amendment rightsand Verizon agrees.

Verizon stands out because they actually hold the specific kind of location records that are directly at issue, says Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Carpenter. The telecoms have a long history in general of cooperating with law enforcement surveillance demands, but I think Verizons participation reflects a growing understanding of the importance of standing up for customers privacy rights."

As the general public becomes increasingly aware of the privacy risks associated with entrusting their data to corporate entities, a strong stance on data protection has been a boon to companies like Apple. This economic incentive may be even stronger for the numerous telecoms that now straddle the line between traditional utility and tech company. Verizon, for example, now owns Yahoo and AOL in addition to its role as a top-four wireless provider in the US.

"At the end of the day, a company like Verizon isnt going to stick its neck out if it doesnt think that theres a business rationale in addition to it being the right thing to do," Wessler says.

Verizon has laid the groundwork for this move for months. Silliman wrote publicly last year about potential Fourth Amendment concerns when telecoms comply with warrantless law enforcement data requests. The company's stand won't necessarily prompt peers to followno other telecoms joined this particular briefbut it still represents a turning point in the dialog between privacy advocates and monolithic telecoms. And in Carpenter v. United States, it's only one of the voices that matters in the larger discussion about data privacy.

"The other tech companies bring the perspective that this case is also about our emails and our smart devices and all the kinds of cloud-stored data that we create in the course of our daily lives now," Wessler says. "The Justices should not be under the misapprehension that they can just try to narrowly apply these outdated precedents from the 1970s in this case. The implications are really huge, and this is the chance to make sure that our understanding of the Fourth Amendment keeps up with digital technology.

More here:
VerizonYes, VerizonJust Stood Up For Your Privacy - WIRED

Several of the largest technology companies in the nation filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to enhance Fourth Amendment protections for consumers by changing the way the amendment is applied to meet the public's expectation of privacy.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Verizon, and several other tech companies filed a brief late Monday night in Carpenter v. United States, a case the high court will hear next term regarding the constitutionality of the warrantless search and seizure of cellphone records showing the location and movements of the phone's user.

The tech giants made no explicit statement regarding how they want the case to be decided, but they wrote in their brief that the Supreme Court "should refine the application of certain Fourth Amendment doctrines to ensure that the law realistically engages with Internet-based technologies and with people's expectations of privacy in their digital data."

"The number and variety of organizations and experts filing represent the widespread recognition that your cell phone's location history is your own business, and the government needs to have a good reason to get its hands on it," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement. "In particular, the tech firms are sending a very clear message that the law needs to catch up with the technology that is now an integral part of our everyday lives." The ACLU is one of the groups representing Timothy Carpenter, the petitioner.

No date has yet been set for Carpenter v. United States' oral arguments.

View post:
Apple, Facebook, others urge Supreme Court to change Fourth Amendment privacy doctrines - Washington Examiner

Press Release | August 14, 2017

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of 19 other media organizations support requiring the government to obtain warrants for access to cellphone location records

The government should not be able to obtain cellphone location records without first getting a warrant, said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The current ruling makes it too easy for the government to track a persons every move through their cellphone, which is especially worrisome if the location records in question belong to a journalist. This endangers journalists ability to gather information and keep the public informed without the risk of being easily and routinely surveilled.

The coalition brief argues that cellphone location records paint an intimate and comprehensive picture of where individuals go, and thus the people and places they associate with.

According to the brief, a journalists cellphone location data can disclose particularly sensitive details about the journalistic process: It can reveal the stories a journalist is working on before they are published, where a journalist went to gather information for those stories, and the identity of a journalists sourcesExposure of sources and journalistic methods can put sources jobs and lives at risk, compromise the integrity of the newsgathering process, and have a chilling effect on reporting.

The brief also argues that if the government can easily and routinely access detailed information about a persons movements without a warrant, it threatens the ability to freely engage in activities protected by the First Amendment like newsgathering, which now often relies on use of a cellphone.

Cellphones have become a mobile newsroom and a necessary newsgathering tool for journalists. Unfortunately, theres no way to use a cellphone without sharing some location data with a service provider, said Brown. Allowing the government to easily access cellphone location records that paint a picture of where a journalist goes and possibly even who they meet with chills reporter-source relationships, threatens newsgathering, and ultimately harms the flow of information to the public.

Continue reading here:
Fourth Amendment protects against warrantless seizure of cellphone location records, amicus brief argues - Reporters Committee for Freedom of the...

If youre following along closely, youll recognize a strong similarity between the brief we filed Friday with the U.S. Supreme Courtin a criminal case called Carpenter v. United States and our argument to a District Court in California two weeks ago that the IRS should not be able to access Bitcoin users data willy-nilly. The theme running through both is that people have property rights in data about themselves that is allocated by contract between them and their service providers. Thats true whether the service being provided is cryptocurrency trading or cellular telecommunications.

In an article I published with the National Constitution Center earlier this year, I laid out a fully consistent way to apply the Fourth Amendment in the digital era. The Supreme Court has struggled with constitutional protections for communications and data, but there doesnt need to be different doctrine for physical things and for digital things. Data can be seized under the Fourth Amendment just like people and cars. Data can be searched just like homes.

In a methodical Fourth Amendment analysis, the next question is who can object to those seizures and searches. Today, various third-party services have control of the data, and some think that closes the question, but it doesnt. The right to possession is only one of the property rights. Those contracts have allocated to consumers the right to exclude othersthat is, to keep strangers away from data about them. The data may sit with a telecom provider, a crypto exchange, a cloud service, or an ISP, but our privacy comes from denying them any right to share data other than with parties agreed to in advance under conditions agreed to in advance.

When possession of data is with a service provider but the right to exclude and other rights are held by the consumer, the consumer has a right against unreasonable searches and seizures. In all but the narrowest of cases involving exigency and similar circumstances, that means the government has to go get a warrant.

Getting courts to recognize property rights in data is a big effort, and itll take a lot of work over a lot of years. But it is essential work because it will determine the shape of our future world.

Theres a path into the future where the Internet revolution causes the individual to become a pawn of governments and corporationsworking together, as often as not, to determine many, many dimensions of how we live and earn. Down the other path is a future where property rights in data make us even more free and autonomous in the digital realm then we are in our homes, neighborhoods, and marketplaces. Heres to charting our course down that second path.

Read the original:
Defending 4th Amendment Privacy Protections for Digital Property - Competitive Enterprise Institute (blog)