Government Cell Phone Tracking

The Government generally needs a warrant from a court to pry into your private life. As a society, we tend to take this for granted. If the police want to listen in to my phone calls, they will have to convince a judge that they have good reason to believe I am doing something wrong. However, anyone can walk by my house and see in the windows if they are open.

So, there is a lot of gray area in deciding what deserves to be private and what is open to the public. Recently, an issue caught my eye that got me alarmed. The government is arguing that tracking your cell phone’s location is something that can be done without a warrant.

the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

The issues turns on the question of whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding this information. Despite what movie portray, I assumed the government couldn’t track me without permission. Surprisingly, when I polled a few friends – they all assumed it was happening already. Part of me wonders if this preception is created by the entertainment industry – which tends to show this as a commonplace activity (think of the humorous scene in Pineapple Express or basically any crime drama on TV).

My second issue with this is that a Congressional Act is the driving force behind why our cell phones can track us anyway.

The Federal Communications Commission’s “Enhanced 911” (E911) requirements allowed rough estimates to be transformed into precise coordinates. Wireless carriers using CDMA networks, such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, tend to use embedded GPS technology to fulfill E911 requirements. AT&T and T-Mobile comply with E911 regulations using network-based technology that computes a phone’s location using signal analysis and triangulation between towers.

These systems were put in place so that a 911 call from a cell phone can be located, since it is not attached to a physical presence. Which is a good thing in an emergency, but ominous when used for other reasons.

A judge in Pennsylvania is fighting the police’s access to this information without a warrant.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan in Pennsylvania denied the Justice Department’s attempt to obtain stored location data without a search warrant; prosecutors had invoked a different legal procedure. Lenihan’s ruling, in effect, would require police to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause–a more privacy-protective standard.

Lenihan’s opinion (PDF)–which, in an unusual show of solidarity, was signed by four other magistrate judges–noted that location information can reveal sensitive information such as health treatments, financial difficulties, marital counseling, and extra-marital affairs.

That last part is critical, think of the information that could be found out about you by tracking where you go everyday.

What do you think? Do you assume the government can track where you go? Do you have an expectation that the GPS information from your cell phone is public knowledge?

A few of my friends pointed out that I am active in social media – namely Foursquare - a location based application where you tell others where you are on twitter and facebook to earn points and organize meetups. My counterpoint is that I choose to give up that information. It isn’t publicly available already and they get my consent to broadcast it. If I have to let a company know it is okay to show my location, why should the government enjoy that information without a good reason?