Americans Have no Privacy Expectation With Cellsite Location Data, 4th Circuit Rules
Americans don't have any expectation of privacy over their historical cellphone location data, and the government can obtain such information without a warrant, said the full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a Tuesday 12-3 ruling that overturned its…
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three-judge panel opinion last year. In U.S. v. Graham, the majority opinion cited Supreme Court precedent in concluding that the government's acquisition of historical cellsite location information (CSLI) from the cellphone provider of a defendant in the case, Aaron Graham, didn't violate his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. "The Court has long held that an individual enjoys no Fourth Amendment protection 'in information he voluntarily turns over to [a] third part[y],'" said the majority's ruling, which said "all of our sister circuits" came to the same conclusion. While the Supreme Court may limit or even eliminate the third-party doctrine in the future and Congress may act to require a warrant for CSLI, the majority 4th Circuit opinion said "without a change in controlling law, we cannot conclude that the Government violated the Fourth Amendment in this case." Three judges who dissented said a cellphone customer "neither possesses the knowledge of his CSLI nor acts to disclose it" and hasn't voluntarily shared location data with a cellphone provider in any "meaningful" way. Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the case, wrote in a blog post that decisions from five appellate courts "means that now, in the vast majority of states, federal law enforcement agents don't need to get a warrant to get access to this data from cell service provider." She wrote the 4th Circuit majority opinion relied "on a wonky legal principle from two 1970s Supreme Court cases" on third-party doctrine but went further, saying "it didn’t matter if cell site location information could reveal sensitive information about our lives."