US Courts refuse GPS data, too

The New York Times has published an article on an upcoming hearing before the US Supreme Court regarding GPS tracking, which may be relevant to this discussion....http//www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/11gps.html?hp

The New York Times has published an article on an upcoming hearing before the US Supreme Court regarding GPS tracking, which may be relevant to this discussion....http//www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/11gps.html?hp

Useful post crazyrudy. There is quite definitely a trend occuring here in the way in which these judgments are being roled out. Policy is oozing out from the references that are being made in the judgments.

The major test implies it will be called either way in this case

"The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"

Potentially, there may be two issues here

(i) Attaching GPS tracking must work on the basis of acquiring data of future movements

(ii) The comparison with (i) would be trakcing the future movements of a mobile phone user where the user's mobile phone has GPS activated.

There is still the issues though of

(iii) GPS data historically collected and saved by the operator as to a user's hanset movements tracked from the activate GPS

(iv) whether the principles of GPS are relevant to cell site data associated with use of Masts (& sectors and/or long/Lat and/or CGI/LAI, TA and so on).

There is alot to imagine why there is a need for requiring justification for obtaining reference data about the movement of an individual and the narrow corridor in time and space for such surveillance.

While the distinctions you draw are interesting, I do not believe they get to the central discussion of the Fourth Amendment analysis, which focuses on the "reasonable expectation of privacy" that an individual may have about there movements and associations. Under previous dicta, American courts have drawn the privacy line around the zone of privacy, that a person may reasonably have, and that the government may not invade. The lower courts have variously disagreed about whether a persons precise, or even approximate, locations are within this zone. Past, present or future, precise or approximate, the zone is the zone, and whether the government is allowed to gather that data, without probable cause, is the question.

The Courts have thus far, generally, allowed a person's public transits to be recorded or observed by government agents without a warrant. Why? Because a person cannot reasonably expect to keep their movements private when they use the public roads, and can be seen in plain view from public observation points. Under this analysis, the new question centers around whether because a person uses a cell phone, that necessarily locates that person in a precise or approximate location, and that person knowingly gives up their expectation of privacy when using this technology. Here is the rub…if you are using that phone inside the walls of your home, what expectation of privacy do you retain? Does this change when you are located in a public mall?

And more recently, courts have adopted a "mass data" theory, where they express concern about the breadth and depth of the data sought. Because a collection of data points reveals more about a person's private affairs than an individual data point, they have recognized a qualitative difference with a large amount of data references to location and associations. The sum of the data is greater than its parts.

I believe that we will continue to see very interesting law and practice develop in this field.

That is a fair observation, my comments don't go to dealing with the central core of the Fourth Amendment and Privacy. I limited my comments to the possible technological aspects.

I have just been reading about another case of privacy where the mobile phone evidence was suppressed in a US court

http//www.llrmi.com/articles/legal_update/2011_co_schutter.shtml

DoJ CSP Data Retention Periods For LE secret memo

http//trewmte.blogspot.com/2011/10/doj-csp-data-retention-periods-for-le.html