RULING REQUIRING WARRANT FOR CELL LOCATION DATA CALLED A FIRST

摘要

A federal judge ruled that cellphone-location data stored by carriers are protected by the Fourth Amendment. Judge Terrence McVerry in the Western District of Pennsylvania upheld a magistrate's decision that police need a warrant for access to the information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the case seems to be the first to go that way. Federal magistrates have been reaching similar conclusions nationwide and prosecutors are often reluctant to appeal for fear of setting a precedent, a wireless industry official said. Carriers would welcome direction from the courts, since they often find themselves caught "between the dog and the fire hydrant," trying to balance subscriber privacy and law enforcement demands, the official said. nnThe Justice Department had argued in the case that police could rely on probable cause to access the records from Sprint Nextel. McVerry was asked to affirm the magistrate's decision in a brief by EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU Foundation of Pennsylvania and the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Cellphone providers store an increasing amount of sensitive data about where you are and when, based on which cell towers your phone uses when making a call," EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston said. "Until now, the government has routinely seized these records without search warrants. This landmark ruling is hopefully only the first of many."