The government needs a warrant to access 60 days of...
The government needs a warrant to access 60 days of cellphone location data, as required by a Texas federal judge, groups told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a friend-of-the-court brief (http://xrl.us/bmyrv4). The ACLU Foundation, ACLU Foundation of…
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Texas, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers quoted from the recent Supreme Court decision in the GPS-tracking case Jones that a “person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband ... and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.” The 5th Circuit should join the 3rd Circuit in finding that courts have the discretion under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) to require a warrant based on probable cause to access “historical” location data, they said. It can avoid constitutional questions about the SCA by extrapolating from the Jones ruling that the high court’s logic applies to cellphone data as well, the brief said. “If tracking a vehicle over 28 days violates a reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment, as was found in Jones, “then tracking a cellphone for more than twice that period surely violates such an expectation as well.” The groups asked the court for oral argument to address the “novel issues” in the appeal.