Court: Cellphone location info does not require warrant

The government does not need a warrant to get a person’s past cellphone location information, the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday. 

The ruling is a victory for the U.S. government and makes it less likely the Supreme Court will take up the case. 

{mosads}The court ruled that law enforcement officers did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they received a standard court order to obtain 221 days of cellphone information from a Maryland armed robbery suspect’s wireless carrier, Sprint. The information included “cell-site location information,” or CSLI, which provided a rough map of where the suspect’s phone was while in use.

The court said that Supreme Court has long held that people have no Fourth Amendment protections for information that is voluntarily turned over to a third-party — in this case, Sprint’s record of the phone’s location.

“The Supreme Court may in the future limit, or even eliminate, the third-party doctrine,” the court wrote in the opinion. “Congress may act to require a warrant for CSLI. But without a change in controlling law, we cannot conclude that the Government violated the Fourth Amendment in this case.”

Tuesday’s ruling by court’s full slate of judges overturns an earlier opinion by a three-judge panel on the 4th Circuit. That earlier ruling created a split with other appeals courts around the country, which might have needed resolution by the Supreme Court. 

“This holding accords with that of every other federal appellate court that has considered the Fourth Amendment question before us,” the court ruled. “Not one has adopted the Defendants’ theory.”

Three of the 15 judges dissented from the opinion. 

Privacy advocates are watching the case closely. Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology all filed briefs urging the court to determine that the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were breached.

They cited a number of recent cases by the Supreme Court, including a 2012 decision in which the high court ruled that when law enforcement installed a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car, that constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment that required a warrant. 

But the court said the facts of Tuesday’s case were different. The case does not involve the government’s own surveillance, the court ruled, only the gathering of information already available. 

Because of that, the court ruled that the case only involves applying the Stored Communications Act, which allows law enforcement to obtain location information with either a warrant or specific facts that show the information is relevant to a criminal investigation. 

The ACLU said the case is not the last word on the issue. 

“As the dissenting judges explain, because months’ worth of cell phone location data can reveal extraordinarily private details of a person’s life, the right way to protect people’s privacy interest in that information is to require a warrant,” the ACLU’s Nathan Freed Wessler said. “The Fourth Circuit’s decision is not the last word on this issue. Other appellate courts will surely address these questions soon, and the Supreme Court may well need to weigh in.”